Boola Boola/Allah Allah

Again, my Progressive friend piques my interest with his commentary on Yale University Press' decision to delete any and all pictorial references to the prophet Muhammad from an upcoming book on the 2005 controversy over Danish political cartoons depicting Muhammad in, um, a less-than-flattering light. The New York Times article about the matter points out that the press' decision was based on the unanimous opinion of two dozen experts, who believed that violating the Islam ban on visual representation of Muhammad would offend Muslims. (Note that Yale didn't just pull the cartoons from the book; it also pulled widely known and disseminated depictions of the prophet. And it made the book's author sign what amounts to a loyalty oath in regards to the decision.)

I tend to be more sympathetic to religion than Progressive, and a little less absolutist on some legal matters. But on this issue, he doesn't go far enough: Yale's actions here are nothing short of shamefully craven. The offensive images are still available all over the Internet, and not including them in a book of which they are the specific topic is, as one critic says, "idiotic." I can't imagine my own book on British television without visuals, no matter how well I might be able to describe Emma Peel (and I can describe her quite well, believe me) and no matter how many Avengers clips you can pull up on YouTube. And to remove other images far less laden with contemporary ideological freight doesn't just shortsell both the author and potential readers -- it insults them. 

What's missing in the reporting and discussion of Yale's self-censorship is at once the most obvious and hypocritical element of it. This isn't about an academic book with a readership in the thousands so offending a group of people that it leads to global rioting; this is about an academic book with a readership in the thousands making some of the corporate and financial patrons of Yale University Press uncomfortable to the point that they apply pressure. And the likelihood of Yale University Press, an arm of an institution that has lost billions of dollars in the past year, having the wherewithal to tell its patrons to take a hike for the sake of free speech is about the same as the likelihood of the Elis playing for the BCS championship next year. So by taking what is really a bottomline business decision and casting it as an ideological cris de couer, Yale gets to have it both ways: We, in our liberal piety, won't publish pictures that might offend hundreds of millions of people (who, in our reactionary world view, might be bloody terrorists who will destroy the interests that allow us to publish anything to begin with.) We're good; they're bad; the people really responsible slip away in the shadows.

Of course, publishing, even academic publishing, is a business, and the bosses at Yale University Press in one sense did their job well: Creating an unnecessary controversy that makes the New York Times moves a lot more copies than just quietly bringing out an academic study of a controversy from four years ago. I just don't think I'll be buying it.