Hitchens on Yale

Christopher Hitchens has a good column on the disgraceful cowardice of Yale University Press. His point is that not only have deliberately censored themselves, but have said that they would have been culpable for any violence resulting from their publication of Danish cartoons:

But now the rot has gone a serious degree further into the fabric. Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility. This is the worst sort of masochism and it subverts our language as well as our concept of moral responsibility. ...

What a cause of shame that the campus of American hero Nathan Hale should have pre-emptively run up the white flag and then cringingly taken the blood guilt of potential assassins and tyrants on itself.

This craven behaviour is eating away at freedom. If you are not prepared to stand up for your rights you don't deserve them.

Visa Denial

Christoper Hitchens writes on the capricious use of visas by governements as a means to censor:

What is at stake in all these cases is not just the right of the people concerned to travel and to take their opinions with them. It is also the right of potential audiences to make their own determination about whom they wish to hear. As a journalist, I can go and visit Hezbollah spokesmen and report back on what it's like and what they say, but why should a reader have to take my word for it?

He also had this to say on excuses for censorship:

One of the effects of the "war on terror," and of one of its concomitants, namely the attrition between the Muslim world and the West, has been an increasing tendency to make exceptions to First Amendment principles, either on the pretext of security or of avoiding the giving of offense. We should have learned by now that, however new the guise, these are the same old stale excuses for censorship.