His CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director-ship

Borders has come in for just a little criticism in the Blogosphere.

And today Mr. Gregory P. Josefowicz, CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director, Borders Books responded:

to Charles Johnson, Director, Pajamas Media, CEO Little Green Foosballs, Rock ‘N’ Roller in the Free World, Stealth Cyclist.”

Dear Mr. Johnson (or may I call you “Charles”?),

How witty! how populist! actually kidding around, while artfully pointing out that Charles Johnson (and those other critical bloggers) are, after all, harumph! not “CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director” of anything in particular. Who are they to tell me? and so on, and so forth, etc…. Did any of them make $1,205,897 in 2005 (with a tidy $7,300,188 in options)?

It clearly takes the big brains to sell those books and lattes, and set those corporate policies. But, personally, I wouldn’t be particularly surprised to find big chain book outlets getting completely replaced by on-line shopping and mail delivery over the next few years, in exactly the same way that movie theatres are having their lunch eaten more and more already by satellite and cable delivery and DVD rental. I also wouldn’t be particularly surprised, a few years down the road, to find Charles Johnson, Director of Pajamas Media making more than you ever did, Herr CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director, old boy.

Some might consider CCPD Josefowicz’s rejoinder alarmist:

The last time I read the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States it seemed pretty clear that the government of these states is ordained and established to “Provide for the common defense,” not Borders Books…

I run a bookstore. A book store. I run a big bookstore. I’ve got 34,000 people, real people, working for me every day in lots of places around the US and in other countries too. Those people owe Borders, every day, one good day’s work. Borders owes the people who work for it a safe day’s work. I’ve got stockholders too, but let’s leave them aside for now, because as much as you may think so, this is not about money. (And yes I caught that business about the fact that we’re trying to open stores in Arab and Muslim countries, but as you may have noticed every country these days contains an Arab and Muslim country.)..

Now you and the other bloggers who are sitting around safe in your undisclosed locations may feel that I have a duty to carry the 46 copies of Free Inquiry magazine with those drawings of the Prophet (Peace be upon his raggedy ass.) in the name of being the last, best bastion of Free Speech in America. I feel your pain, but after due consideration I must respectfully instruct you all to just pound sand.

Who do you think we are up here in Ann Arbor, the 82nd Airborne?..

Having read this self-congratulatory poltroonery, I’d normally be commenting that Mohammed-in-Hell (hit the Danish cartoon link button in my right column) will be shovelling snow the next time I buy a book in Borders, but I might get swatted the way a fellow blogger did:

Bidinotto’s not buying anymore. Door. Ass. Bang.

Yeah, Borders under Josefowicz is a class act.

Yesterday, Borders and Waldenbooks surrendered to the savages, and announced that would not carry the April/May issue of Free Inquiry, containing a mere four of the cartoons featuring Mohammed published in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten. (You can find all twelve right over in my right-hand column, all day, every day. And try clicking on them!)

In the true spirit of capitalists always willing to sell rope to those intending to hang them, the bookstore chain’s management attempted to justify capitulating to Islamic censorship of expression thusly:

“For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority,” Borders Group Inc. spokeswoman Beth Bingham said Wednesday…

..Bingham said the decision was made before the magazine arrived at the company’s stores. Borders Group, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., operates more than 475 Borders and 650 Waldenbooks stores in the United States, though not all regularly carry the magazine

Or, “Threaten us, and we’ll do essentially anything you want.”

Today, the forces of planetary political correctnesss are celebrating an “International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination,” but don’t suppose that is intended to mean white farmers should be permitted to own farms in Zimbabwe.

No, the poster reference is a Lego, the product of Denmark’s best-known company, and the form that racism is purportedly taking is colored red, like the Danish flag.

Sandmonkey gets it right.
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The Blogosphere wins another one. The Lego poster was taken down.

Daily Illini student Editor-in-Chief Acton Gorton was fired yesterday by the Illini Media Company board of directors, after “a thorough review, a report by a student task force of senior members of the staff, and a hearing” found that Gorton violated Daily Illini policies about “thoughtful discussion of and preparation for the publication of inflammatory material.” Gorton published the Danish Jyllands-Posten cartoons on February 9th.

The board, made up of University of Illinois students and faculty, voted unanimously to fire Gorton. Opinions Editor Chuck Prochaska, who was also suspended on February 14th, was reinstated, but decline to return to the paper.

Earlier posting.

It’s not going to be necessary for the sons of the Prophet to attack Evansville. The local authorities have already accepted their status as dhimmis (subjugated members of an inferior culture and faith) and are prepared to enforce Sharia (Islamic law) voluntarily.
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Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Wretchard reflects on Tim Blair’s observation that the Danish cartoons were more widely published in Islamic countries than in Canada, New Zealand or Australia, and went unpublished by a single major US daily, and concludes that the media’s self-censorship wasn’t really occasioned by fear of Islamic violence.

I think the real reason for the reluctance among Anglospheric publications to print the Danish cartoons was less timidity than the fear of tacitly repudiating the underlying assumption of the President Bush’s War on Terror, that the West is not at war with Islam but only with a small group of extremists who have corrupted “the religion of peace”. The Danish cartoons threatened to convert this limited war into a more general confrontation between the value systems of the West and Islam…

Once the Danish cartoon crisis threatened to knock the props out from under President Bush’s limited war on Islamic renegades and escalate it to a “clash of civilizations” the barrenness of the Lefist intellectual cupboard became obvious even to themselves. There was no recipe to deal with this contingency. A “clash of civilizations” would pull matters from their grasp precisely because they refused to touch it in the first place. They could only continue to pretend Islamism didn’t exist; and so they thrust their heads into the sand even further. The Danish cartoons? What cartoons?

“We Refuse to Renounce our Critical Intelligence”

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all. The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats. Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people. We reject cultural relativism, which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical intelligence out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia”, an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers. We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical intellect may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas. We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

12 signatures

Ayaan Hirsi Ali – Chahla Chafiq – Caroline Fourest – Bernard-Henri Lévy – Irshad Manji – Mehdi Mozaffari – Maryam Namazie – Taslima Nasreen -Salman Rushdie – Antoine Sfeir – Philippe Val – Ibn Warraq

The 12 signatories (from left to right): Ayaan Hirsi
Ali – Chala Chafiq – Caroline Fourest- Bernard-Henri Lévy – Irshad Manji – Mehdi Mozaffari – Maryam Namazie – Taslima Nazreen – Salman Rushdie – Antoine Sfeir – Philippe Val – Ibn Warraq
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Published in Jyllands-Posten, reported by Politically Incorrect. Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

Described as circulating on the Internet by Le Devoir, a French Québécoise paper.

“A believer wounded by the unbelievers. An unbeliever wounded by the believers.”

It’s by Delize, and probably appeared in Le Monde or France Soir. The same Delize did the earlier “Relax, Mohammed” cartoon in France Soir.
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Hat tip to Matthias Storme.

At the University of Illinois:

CHICAGO—The editor in chief of a student-led newspaper serving the University of Illinois has been suspended after printing cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad that, when published in Europe, enraged Muslims and led to violent protests in the Middle East and Asia.

Editor in chief Acton Gorton and his opinion editor, Chuck Prochaska, were relieved of their duties at The Daily Illini on Tuesday while a task force investigates the internal decision-making and communication that led to the publishing of the cartoons, according to a statement by the newspaper’s publisher and general manager, Mary Cory.

Inside Hoover House, a scurrilous joking note about the Prophet Muhammad was taped to a dorm room door. A Muslim resident was outraged. It was the kind of incident that could have sparked serious trouble.

But a deputy dean at the University of Chicago says the culprit defused the situation by writing a note of apology.

“While his desire to make a statement was not intended to be directed at any one individual, that he had demonstrated insensitivity,” said Deputy Dean Cheryl Gutman.

The head of the University of Chicago’s Muslim Student Association says it was apparently an act of stupidity, not blind hatred.

“I think an apology is very important, just to say that he didn’t mean what he was doing, and like I said, it was an act of ignorance,” said Mohammed Hasan…

..Since the apology was made, and the Muslim student accepted it, the university chose not to punish or evict the other young man. The University of Chicago considers the incident closed.

Details remain unclear as to whether disciplinary action will be taken against a Hoover House resident who posted a homemade sketch of the Muslim prophet Muhammad on the door of his suite two weeks ago.

Accompanied by the caption “Mo’ Mohammed, Mo’ Problems,” the drawing prompted strong reactions from Muslim students on campus and, more recently, attracted the attention of free speech advocates.

Katie Callow-Wright, director of undergraduate student housing, said that although details on the status of the case could not be discussed, the process of addressing such complaints involves a series of discussions and careful review.

“When a resident reports an incident or concern to their resident staff or the Housing Office, the resident staff gather information by talking with students and, if necessary, other staff to understand all of the facts of the situation,” she said. “This is an informal process, and can sometimes entail several individual meetings or conversations.”

Callow-Wright added that the appropriate Resident Heads (RHs) would hold individual meetings with the student who allegedly violated community standards.

“Depending upon the situation, a meeting with a student or students might then take place in the Office of Undergraduate Student Housing,” she said.

Christopher Hitchens demands (in a must-read editorial) that we stand up for Denmark.

The incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark (and in some places, against the embassies and citizens of any Scandinavian or even European Union nation) is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability! A small democratic country with an open society, a system of confessional pluralism, and a free press has been subjected to a fantastic, incredible, organized campaign of lies and hatred and violence, extending to one of the gravest imaginable breaches of international law and civility: the violation of diplomatic immunity. And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let’s be sure we haven’t hurt the vandals’ feelings.

Max Boot concludes that it’s not just opportunistic leaders fanning the flames of Islamic hatred over the Danish cartoons:

Why are so many Muslims so enraged by a handful of cartoons published in an obscure Danish newspaper?

It’s not enough to point out how the governments of Egypt, Syria and Iran are stoking the protests in a cynical ploy to deflect Western pressure for democratic reform and to curry favor with Islamic radicals. Their strategy wouldn’t be so successful if it didn’t resonate with deeply ingrained attitudes among the Muslim multitudes.

I got an earful of those views last week in Kuala Lumpur while attending a conference sponsored by New York University and the Malaysian Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations. The ostensible subject was: “Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?”

We never did answer those questions, but the infidel attendees did get a redhot blast of indignation from the Muslim participants, who hailed not only from East Asia but also from Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Even though all of the Muslim delegates were intellectuals, activists, politicians and other movers and shakers, they resonated with the rage of the dispossessed. With considerable justification, they fulminated against the backwardness of the Islamic world compared to the West. With considerably less justification, they blamed their frustrations on the West.

If only I had a ringgit [the basic unit of money in Malaysia] for every time some delegate complained that the plight of the Palestinians showed the world’s anti-Muslim bias. One attendee even had the gall to claim that Israel is allowed to violate U.N. resolutions while no Muslim state has that luxury—at the very moment Iran is thumbing its nose at the United Nations!

This was coupled with ritualistic denunciations of other anti-Muslim offenses—from the real (Russian repression in Chechnya) to the farcical (a Pakistani academic blamed the CIA for creating Islamic fundamentalism in his country).

Naturally the United States got scant credit (except from one Bosnian) for repeatedly waging war to free Muslims from oppression. Instead of being thanked for saving Muslims from genocide in places like Kosovo, the United States was denounced for committing genocide against them.

Other complaints abounded—the global financial system is biased against Muslim countries like Indonesia (which was hurt by the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis); the propagation of knowledge is dominated by American universities like Harvard and Yale; the U.N. Security Council has no permanent Islamic member ; and on and on.

Of course, blaming the United States for the world’s ills is not an exclusively Islamic phenomenon, as one non-Muslim attendee from Austria proved by complaining that Hollywood had destroyed the European film industry.

But such whininess is particularly pronounced among the large number of Muslims who have never come to grips with the subservient position they have occupied in world affairs since Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt.

In recent years, some Muslims, notably the authors of the 2002 U.N. Arab Human Development Report, have been acknowledging internal problems—a lack of freedom, honest government, gender equality, scientific research and education—that have turned their societies into global also-rans.

But in Kuala Lumpur there wasn’t much introspection in evidence. Most attendees—and I suspect their views are broadly representative of the Muslim world as a whole—preferred to rant against supposed Western oppression.

The cartoon brouhaha not only confirms this victimization legend, it assuages the shame many Muslims feel over the atrocities committed in their name by Osama bin Laden & Co. To hear many Muslim attendees talk, you would think there is no difference between a cartoonist who injured no one physically and terrorists who kill thousands of innocent people.

The trope of the conference seemed to be: “We have our extremists. . . and you have yours.” Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami took this argument to its logical conclusion by equating American neoconservatives with al-Qaida. As if Paul Wolfowitz were plotting to crash hijacked aircraft into Tehran office buildings.

The most depressing aspect of the whole cartoon affair is not the intolerance for press freedom exhibited throughout Muslim lands. It is the willingness of so many Muslims to scapegoat the West for their own failures.

Muslim nations will never make any progress unless they stop focusing on the offenses, real or imagined, visited upon them by the outside world and start looking within for what ails them.

The Guardian reports that Peshawar Imam Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi announced a bounty of $25,000 and a car from the Mohabat Khan mosque for the death of an unspecified Danish cartoonist. The holy man (who probably can’t read and write) evidently did not understand that the cartoons were produced by twelve different cartoonists.

Qureshi said the mosque and his religious school would give $25,000 and a car, while a local jewelers’ association would give another $1 million. No representative of the association was available to confirm it had made the offer.

“This is a unanimous decision by all imams (prayer leaders) of Islam that whoever insults the prophet deserves to be killed and whoever will take this insulting man to his end, will get this prize,” Qureshi said.

What Europe and/or the United States (in the probable absence of European capability) ought to do in response to the sort of thing is what a 19th century British government would have done in response to insolent primitives stirring up native hostility. We should send troops into Peshawar to level the mosque offering this blood money, apprehend and hang Qureshi (with a pigskin rope), pillage and sack the Peshawar jewelers district, and then compel the government of Pakistan to pay for the costs of the expedition.

Michelle Malkin posts the question half the blogosphere is asking:

Why the Abu Ghraib photos, but not the Mohammed Cartoons?

Seattle’s underground paper The Stranger published the cartoons, and along with them Bruce Bawer’s commentary:

Many Europeans agree with Kofi Annan that freedom “should always be exercised in a way that fully respects… religious beliefs, “ and with Sunday Times (UK) columnist Simon Jenkins that the main question here is “whether we truly want to share a world in peace with those who have values and religious beliefs different from our own.” What’s called for, they say, is “respect,” “restraint,” and “responsibility.” And, above all, “sensitivity.” For them, this is simply a case of the powerful mocking the faith of the weak.

On the contrary, what’s happening here is that a gang of bullies—led by a country, Saudi Arabia, where Bibles are forbidden, Christians tortured, Jews routinely labeled “apes and pigs” in the state-controlled media, and apostasy from Islam punished by death—is trying to compel a tiny democracy to live by its own theocratic rules. To succumb to pressure from this gang would simply be to invite further pressure, and lead to further concessions—not just by Denmark but by all of democratic Europe. And when they’ve tamed Europe, they’ll come after America.

After all, the list of Western phenomena that offend the sensibilities of many Muslims is a long one—ranging from religious liberty, sexual equality, and the right of gay people not to have a wall dropped on them, to music, alcohol, dogs, and pork. After a few Danish cartoons, what’s next?

Make no mistake, this is no isolated incident. It’s one step in a long-term effort by extreme Muslim forces to erode Western liberties and turn free, affluent countries into mirror images of their own dysfunctional dictatorships. “Muslims have a dream of living in an Islamic society,” declared a Danish Muslim leader in 2000. “This dream will surely be fulfilled in Denmark…. We will eventually be a majority.” (Or as a T-shirt popular among young Muslims in Stockholm puts it: “2030—then we take over.”) Even after the bombings in Madrid and London and the riots in Paris, many European leaders continue to be in denial about this effort; others, as eager as Neville Chamberlain at Munich to “keep the peace,” seem already to have chosen a policy of gradual surrender, accompanied by flurries of sycophantic praise for Islam and apology for Western liberties.

Seneca the Younger at YARGB links a thoughtful response to the widespread Islamic sense of injury and outrage over the Danish cartoons featuring images of the Prophet Mohammed.