Deborah B. Sloan, at American Thinker, describes the failure of the Republican congressional leadership to rise to the challenge of educating the public and confronting the left, and their choice of cowardice and conformity to the politics of the left instead.

“I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday,” Congressman Barton said. “I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown — in this case, a $20 billion shakedown. … I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong is subject to some sort of political pressure that is — again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown.”

Amen, Congressman Barton. It is horrifying to witness the constant statist attack on property rights and the rule of law while being essentially powerless to stop it. What a relief it was to hear someone who does have a modicum of power speak out against this assault on our nation.

Of course, the usual suspects on the left — most notably Joe Biden — leaped onto their soap boxes and screamed bloody murder in reaction to Congressman Barton’s statements; they regurgitated worn-out clichés about Republicans being “in the pockets of Big Oil.”

This sort of tantrum always erupts when someone takes a principled stand against the left. It was an opportunity for the Republican leadership’s response to second Mr. Barton’s concern for the enormously important principles involved, to advocate reimbursement via the constitutionally supported mechanism of due process for people who were harmed by the oil leak, and to firmly tell the Obama regime that they will not be receiving any apologies — that it is they who owe apologies to the American people for the fraud, corruption, theft, and full-blown terror they have subjected us to since January 2009.

Instead, the House Republican leadership denounced the stand taken by Mr. Barton and demanded that he apologize. This type of spinelessness on the part of the Republicans has contributed significantly to the erosion of freedom in America over the past century. Ayn Rand observed that

[t]he uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other — until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.

With the exception of the fight against ObamaCare, the current Republican leadership have demonstrated that they are unwilling to stand up to the left. The solution to this is not a third party. Instead, the Republican establishment must be phased out and replaced with a new school of leaders who will proudly fight for freedom and capitalism with the same endurance and unapologetic fervor that the left has exhibited for collectivism and tyrannical big government.

A lot of taxpayers’ money was wasted on this impressive entrance

Yahoo News:

The Supreme Court is closing its iconic front entrance beneath the words “Equal Justice Under Law.”

Beginning Tuesday, visitors no longer will ascend the wide marble steps to enter the 75-year-old building. Instead, they will be directed to a central screening facility to the side of and beneath the central steps that was built to improve the court’s security as part of a $122 million renovation.

Two justices, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, called the change unfortunate and unjustified.

Breyer said no other high court in the world, not even Israel’s, has closed its front entrance over security concern. …

Other justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, have spoken fondly of being able to walk up the steps and through the 1,300-pound bronze doors at the center of the court’s columned entryway. Justice Anthony Kennedy told C-SPAN last year that the steps and the words, written by building architect Cass Gilbert, were intended to inspire visitors and justices alike.

The court said the new entrance grew out of two independent security studies in 2001 and 2009.

The fortress-mentality that has taken over all the court houses I’ve visited in recent years has finally reached the Supreme Court of the United States.

The monumental entrance is just not ideally conducive to electronic searches, so it will no longer be used for its intended purpose.

In my lifetime, we’ve gone from the America of Norman Rockwell to the Amerika of Franz Kafka and the security state that makes you remove shoes in airport boarding lines. Arriving visitors and attorneys will get to slink in some subterranean bunker entrance where they can be properly channeled through security stops. Our courthouses are not open to the public any longer. Who knows? Someone might try to rebel and attack the authorities. All our officials need constant protection from us.

I can remember just a bit over a decade ago being in the Clinton County Courthouse in Lock Haven (Pennsylvania) researching a few deeds in the Recorder’s Office. There were some good old boys in camouflage, their shotguns leaning on the wall, practicing turkey calls in the corridor while the ladies in the sheriff’s office critiqued their performances through the open doorway.

Today, you get searched every time you walk into a courthouse. The first time I ran into this kind of crap outside the big city was in Danbury, Connecticut in the mid-1990s. The rent-a-cop demanded I remove my belt, and in my outrage and frustration I delivered an indignant ex tempore sermon on the subject of the decline of freedom in the United States to the general population in the hallway.

The security guard scoldingly informed me that I should be grateful that he was protecting a mere civilian like me against someone coming into the building with a gun and injuring me. He then warned me against openly challenging official policies.

My wife wasn’t present, and I got a little more angry.

“Why exactly is somebody carrying a gun such a big deal?” I deliberately responded. “You have a gun, you little pipsqueak.” I observed, “I don’t, and I’m not afraid of you.” I then leaned toward him, invading his personal space and grinned, implicitly offering him an invitation to reach for it, feeling quite sure I could swat him before he could clear his holster. He thought seriously about it for a few seconds, and decided not to try.

I got some mixed reactions from the crowd. Several people gave me some very fishy looks. A few guys grinned. The security guard did his best to look intensely occupied, and the moment passed.

Young men of Brockworth in Gloucestershire have from Time Immemorial, at least for a couple of centuries, possibly even from Roman or Phoenician Antiquity, been celebrating the arrival of Spring with the annual Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake, a peculiar local competition involving a hazardous madcap pursuit down a steep hill after a large round block of Double Gloucester cheese.

The London Times reports that safety, insurance, and traffic considerations, in other words bureaucracy and general poltroonery, have caused this year’s cheese-rolling to be cancelled.

A centuries-old cheese rolling contest has fallen victim to health and safety — but not because of the broken bones and dozens of other injuries sustained each year.

Organisers of Gloucestershire’s annual competition have cancelled the event due to be held on May 31 because of concerns raised by the police and local authority over traffic and crowd control.

Good blog article on the tradition

Cheese-Rolling in Gloucestershire web-site

Maccabees “Can You Give It” 3:18 Cheese-Rolling song video

Hat tip to No Pasaran.

The Telegraph reports that a week ago today, West Mercia police, obedient to safety regulations, left a five-year-old trapped in a submerged car for close to two hours waiting for properly-trained specialists to arrive.

The five-year-old girl, her-six year-old brother and their father Chris Grady were in the car when it plunged into the river Avon in Evesham, Worcestershire, on Thursday morning.

Mr Grady and his son Ryan, managed to escape from the submerged car. They were helped clear by police officers on the riverbank.

However, Mr Grady’s daughter, Gabrielle, was trapped inside the vehicle for 97 minutes before the closest police dive team, based in the next county, could arrive. The divers then took a further 12 minutes to rescue her.

The officers already on the scene were prevented from diving in earlier to rescue her by police safety regulations.

The little girl remained in a critical state in hospital yesterday while her brother yesterday began to make a recovery.

He was well enough to sit up in bed and talk to family at his bedside.

West Mercia police admitted last night that safety regulations barred normal police officers from jumping into rivers to try to save people.

A police spokesman said the closest available police dive team was Avon and Somerset constabulary.

“Their team arrived within 97 minutes of the original request being made.

“Once they had arrived it took only a further 12 minutes to rescue the child from the submerged vehicle.

“At the time of the original request Avon and Somerset Dive Team were involved in an underwater search for a missing person in Gloucestershire.

“Police officers are not trained or equipped to enter rivers in order to rescue people.

“They are trained and equipped to make rescues from riverbanks.

“The risk involved in untrained and ill-equipped officers entering the water in these circumstances are generally too high to contemplate.

The American Pseudo-Intelligentsia desires above all things that the United States should become ever more like Europe. The tragedy in Worcestershire demonstrates that the brave new Progressive world all tidily ruled over and arranged into order by centralized authority leaves no room for initiative, improvisation, and reckless courage, no room for humanity. Yet, in a real emergency, it is precisely the unruly individual, the human being willing to risk everything and to ignore the rulebook, that makes the critical difference. They’ve done an excellent job of eliminating people like that in the socialist bureaucracies of modern Europe, including Britain.

Some news agency:

A survivor of an Alabama university shooting said the professor charged in the attack that claimed three lives methodically shot the victims in the head until her gun apparently jammed and she was pushed out of the room.

Associate professor Joseph Ng told The Associated Press on Tuesday he was one of 12 people at the biology department meeting Friday at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. He described the details in an e-mail to a colleague at the University of California-Irvine.

Ng said the meeting had been going on for about half an hour when Amy Bishop “got up suddenly, took out a gun and started shooting at each one of us. She started with the one closest to her and went down the row shooting her targets in the head.”…

Ng said the meeting was held around an oval table. The six people on one side were all shot.

“The remaining 5 including myself were on the other side of the table (and) immediately dropped to the floor,” he wrote.

Ng told the AP the shooting stopped almost as soon as it started. Ng said the gun seemed to jam and he and others rushed Bishop out of the room and then barricaded the door shut with a table.

Ng said the charge was led by Debra Moriarity, a professor of biochemistry, after Bishop aimed the gun at her and attempted to fire but it didn’t shoot. He said Moriarity pushed her way to Bishop, urged her to stop, and then helped force her out the door.

“Moriarity was probably the one that saved our lives. She was the one that initiated the rush,” he told the AP. “It took a lot of guts to just go up to her.”

Ng said the survivors worried she would shoot her way through the door, and frantically worked up backup plan in case she burst through. But she never did.

I thought it was interesting to read how when Amy Bishop’s gun jammed (or was simply empty), after she had shot six people, several of the remaining biologists were sufficiently driven by survival instinct to rise from hiding on the floor, ask her to stop shooting people(!), and then, as she presumably gaped at them in astonishment, employ superior numbers to push her out the door. After which, they proceeded to try to barricade themselves inside. It would be just too bad, of course, for anybody else who had recently offended Amy Bishop who happened along after she reloaded or cleared her jam.

Five people made no attempt to apprehend or disarm a woman who was obviously, temporarily at least, unable to fire any more rounds. As far as they were concerned, short term personal survival was the key priority. Dealing with Professor Bishop would be a job for the authorities. Let the police and the rest of the university community take their own chances. And when I look over the list of department members (not named in the article), it does seem to be the case that the majority of the persons potentially present, and not otherwise accounted for, would have been male.

“I want to go to Princeton,” said Amory. “I don’t know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.”

“That’s it.”

–F. Scott Fitzgerald, Princeton ’17, This Side of Paradise.

Andrew Sullivan will be so proud.

The Yale Freshman Class Council (I don’t think we had one of those in my day) decided to produce a T shirt for the Harvard Game featuring some expression or other of the Yale point of view on the classic athletic rivalry.

There was an opportunity for design suggestions, followed by a vote.

Yale Daily News:

The original design, which won out over five other entries, displayed an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote in the front — “I think of all Harvard men as sissies” — in bold white letters. The back of the long-sleeved, navy blue T-shirt said “WE AGREE” in capital letters, with “The Game 2009” scrawled in script underneath it.

Well, Yale has its own sissies these days, and they are organized and influential.

[T]he term ‘sissies’ is considered offensive and demeaning, and as well as a “thinly-veiled gay slur,” said Julio Perez-Torres ’12, a member of the LGBT Co-op.

After the winning design was announced, FCC President Brandon Levin ’13 said, several students raised concerns about the design to their respective FCC representatives, which they in turn brought to the attention of the FCC Executive Board and Dean of Freshman Affairs Raymond Ou.

The LGBT Co-op first heard about the T-shirts from a member of the Yale College Council, LGBT Co-op Coordinator Rachel Schiff ’10 said. She followed suit by contacting the dean and master of her college — Silliman — to encourage dialogue among the Co-op, administrators and FCC.

Ou said Wednesday that he first heard about the winning T-shirt design when FCC brought the complaints to him. In response, he told the FCC chairs to meet with the concerned students face to face. Shortly after he told FCC to respond to the co-op’s concerns, Ou said, he told Yale College Dean Mary Miller about the issue, and she decided to pull the design.

“What purports to be humor by targeting a group through slurs is not acceptable,” Miller said in an e-mail to the News. …

[The Freshman Class Council] decided to withdraw that design and opt for a different one, featuring a white ‘H’ in the front inside a transluscent white circle, with a white line slashed through it. …

YCC President Jon Wu ’11, who said he has been advising the FCC on the issue, said the problem was that the line of people that approved the shirts did not realize the word “sissies” was offensive.

“None of us realized the connotation,” Wu said in an e-mail to the News. “No member of the Yale community should feel marginalized.”

The liberal tradition of pluralism and tolerance has evolved into a readiness to swoon and surrender in the face of any complaint or demand for concession by any group traditionally held in contempt.

Why even hold a Harvard game? If Yale cannot take the position that being a sissy is something of a negative, that being weak and cowardly and effeminate is undesirable, on what possible basis can the University justify being so rude and insensitive as to try to injure the feelings of the Harvard community by defeating its team in a violent athletic competition?

Yale’s administration, Freshman Class Council, and certainly its LGBT Co-op ought to draft an immediate letter conceding all future football games and other athletic contests to rival schools, apologize for each and every past expression of animosity and contempt, and humbly beg pardon for all the times in which Yale was crude enough to win.

It is becoming actively embarrassing to be associated with that University.

Hat tip to Robert Shibley at PJM.

Evan R. Goldstein in Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses the infamous behavior of the current Yale Administration which chose to grovel in the direction of bigoted and fanatical primitives out of a classic New England establishment combination of effete cowardice combined with mercenary greed for financial rewards destined to flow from Arab states paying Yale to operate outposts of Western learning in their camel-scented capitals.

They really should have changed Yale’s color from Blue to Chrome Yellow while they were at it.

(Jytte Klaussen, the author of The Cartoons That Shook the World) was informed by John E. Donatich, director of the Yale press, that all illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad would be removed from her forthcoming book out of concern that they might provoke violence. “I threw up my hands,” an obviously incredulous Klausen recalled during a recent interview. Yale’s decision, made public in The New York Times in August, has been heatedly debated. “This misguided action established a dangerous precedent that threatens academic and intellectual freedom around the world,” warned the National Coalition Against Censorship. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, called the press’s action “fundamentally cowardly.” Reza Aslan, a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, withdrew his blurb from the book.

Klausen is plainly exhausted by the controversy. “It has been hard to see the book being sucked into the same polarization that took place around the cartoons.” She does not support Sarah Ruden, a poet and classicist who has previously published with Yale, who has called for academics to boycott the press. The press has already suffered, Klausen says. “Why pile it on?”

In conversation, it is clear that Klausen is relieved, at last, to be discussing the substance of her book, a detectivelike narrative that turns on this question: How did 12 drawings in a provincial daily newspaper provoke an international crisis? …

when does respect for cultural sensitivities drift into a curb on freedom of speech? What is the proper balance between responsible and free speech? “I don’t think free speech gives you license, particularly not as an academic, to say or print anything you want,” Klausen says. “As academics we have an obligation to speak on the basis of evidence and facts, but with sensitivity to religious precepts. But those precepts—be they Muslim, Christian, or Jewish—can’t dictate what we do.” The removal of the cartoons from her book, she says, violated that commitment to evidence and facts. “Worse,” she adds, “this is historical evidence that has been removed from eyesight.”

You can rely on liberals to start looking for the exit.

The New York Times tells us that King Obama is making his decisions with the counsel of the court clown.

President Obama is exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan, including a plan advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan, officials said Tuesday.

——————————————————-

Hugh Hewitt recognizes how serious a choice Obama is making.

The idea of rejecting the proposals of the new commander on the ground less than six months after his appointment is bad enough, but to do so because Slow Joe Biden has a bright idea is truly terrible.

The president’s domestic agenda is in a shambles and his ratings are plummeting to near record levels for a modern president in his first year in office. His global warming hysteria of yesterday adds to the idea of a rookie being handed unvetted speeches –like the one in Congress with the man who died from denial of treatment, except he didn’t– and rushing off to his next media event.

Thousands of Americans died because of the Taliban’s partnership with al Qaeda, a partnership that endures. Hundreds more have died pushing the Taliban-al Qaeda alliance deep into the remote mountains of the region. General McChrystal’s report asserts that with the right forces, stability can be achieved, and within an acceptable number of years.

The choice facing President Obama is a defeat and vulnerability to more terror plots and a second mission back when one occurs, or the acceptance of the commanding general’s recommendations. This isn’t hard. The fact that Joe Biden is on the other side makes it even easier to tell Secretary Gates to proceed with the McChyrstal plan.

Probably, Obama and Mr. Vice-Blowhard-Doofus are thinking that the day is not far off when their own leftwing base will find stabbing American forces in the back one more time absolutely irresistible. So Obama is giving serious consideration to trying to avoid the misery of Lyndon Johnson by resorting to the cowardice of Jimmy Carter.

Debkafile, which reported August 29th a leak (apparently from Polish sources) that plans were underway to substitute defense facilities in Turkey and Israel for those originally intended to be sited in Poland and the Czech Republic, is now telling us that Obama has made a deal to site US missile defense systems on a Russian military base in Azerbaijan (!).

DEBKA also, with a note of contempt, reveals that the Israeli based systems is already in place and “working perfectly.”

DEBKA characterizes the Obama Administration’s move as a “surrender to Moscow.”

This is a bit older, slightly nicer version of the Boy Scout Knife I used to carry back during the Consulate of Plancus.

You see how these things work?

There’s a little accident, and first they come and take away your cannon. Next, before long, they won’t even let Boy Scouts carry pocket knives. The utter and complete emasculation of society is a slippery slope process.

Telegraph:

New advice published in Scouting, the official in-house magazine, says neither Scouts nor their parents should bring penknives to camp except in “specific” situations.

Scouts have traditionally been taught how to use knives correctly, using them on camping trips to cut firewood or carve tools.

At one point Scouts were allowed to carry a sheath knife on their belt as part of their uniform although this is no longer the case. In recent years the Scout Association guidance has been that parents should carry knives to camps or meetings.

Dave Budd, a knife-maker who runs courses training Scouts about the safe use of blades, wrote that the growing problem of knife crime meant action had to be taken.

“Sadly, there is now confusion about when a Scout is allowed to carry a knife,” he wrote. “The series of high-profile fatal stabbings [has] highlighted a growing knife culture in the UK.

“I think it is safest to assume that knives of any sort should not be carried by anybody to a Scout meeting or camp, unless there is likely to be a specific need for one. In that case, they should be kept by the Scout leaders and handed out as required.”

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Even farther back, before WWII, there used to be an official Boy Scout sheath knife. It seems to have been an adaptation by a different company (Ka-Bar? Camillus?) of the old Webster Marble Woodcraft pattern.

——————————————–
British Scouting Commissioner says story is unfair, Update 9/9:

Wayne Bulpitt, UK Chief Commissioner, says the Daily Mail’s Sunday edition used “a few selective statements and quotes some out of context.”

There’s no story here, Bulpitt claims. Why! We’ve been discouraging scouts from carrying pen-knives for years.

A Mail on Sunday journalist approached us on Friday having read the latest guidance we issued in Scouting Magazine/online in December 08 and April 09 on advising Scouts on the situations in which they can use a knife as part of normal Scout Activities. He was looking to make the story into “Scouts Ban knives shocker”. The media team took them through the facts and sent them links to our various documents and magazine articles giving him the following info,

– The Rules changed about wearing knives with uniform in 1968
– We have issued regular guidance to the Movement on this matter ever since 1968 e.g. early 1980’s , 1996, 2008 and 2009 (the latest being the magazine article in April/May)
– We need to support leaders with information to help them support young people

Despite making these facts available the Mail on Sunday published the piece, They used a few selective statements and quotes some out of context..

A number of newspapers this morning (Times, Telegraph, Express, Mirror, Sun) have taken the text from the Mail on Sunday (without talking to us) and have run with the story.

I’m not especially moved by Mr. Bulpitt’s complaints personally, but I thought he was entitled to a place on the record.

I keep these permanently linked from my right column

Christopher Hitchens does not find persuasive the rationale for Yale’s preemptive surrender in removing the Danish Mohammed cartoons, and other images by Dore, Dali, Botticelli, Rodin, &c., from a new Yale University Press book on the Cartoon Jihad allegedly supplied by a panel of “experts.”

We have serious problems with expertise in the elite circles of the contemporary intelligentsia. Its members’ utter and complete lack of both testosterone and common sense tends to preclude the possibility of the combination of mastery of any particular specialized topic with demonstrated skill in the manipulation of words and symbols being associated with sound judgement or manly behavior.

The Aug. 13 New York Times carried a report of the university press’ surrender, which quoted its director, John Donatich, as saying that in general he has “never blinked” in the face of controversy, but “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”

Donatich is a friend of mine and was once my publisher, so I wrote to him and asked how, if someone blew up a bookshop for carrying professor Klausen’s book, the blood would be on the publisher’s hands rather than those of the bomber. His reply took the form of the official statement from the press’s public affairs department. This informed me that Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that “[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.”

So here’s another depressing thing: Neither the “experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies” who were allegedly consulted, nor the spokespeople for the press of one of our leading universities, understand the meaning of the plain and common and useful word instigate. If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it’s a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it’s a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won’t wear the veil have “provoked” those who rape or disfigure them … and now Yale has adopted that “logic” as its own.

It was bad enough during the original controversy, when most of the news media—and in the age of “the image” at that—refused to show the cartoons out of simple fear. 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 involves inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral responsibility.

Last time this happened, I linked to the Danish cartoons so that you could make up your own minds about them, and I do the same today. Nothing happened last time, but who’s to say what homicidal theocrat might decide to take offense now. I deny absolutely that I will have instigated him to do so, and I state in advance that he is directly and solely responsible for any blood that is on any hands. He becomes the responsibility of our police and security agencies, who operate in defense of a Constitution that we would not possess if we had not been willing to spill blood—our own and that of others—to attain it. The First Amendment to that Constitution prohibits any prior restraint on the freedom of the press. What a cause of shame that the campus of Nathan Hale should have pre-emptively run up the white flag and then cringingly taken the blood guilt of potential assassins and tyrants upon itself.

Yale Bans Cartoons, August 13

Salvador Dali, The Divine Comedy Suite (Inferno): Mohammed, wood cut, 1952-1964

the oh-so-terrible Danish cartoons

The New York Times reported one of the most shameful and contemptible events in Yale’s three century long history.

Here is one of the richest and most prestigious universities in the civilized world piously turning its back on the core Western principles of open exchange of ideas and freedom of expression in order to avert the violence of primitive bigots and fanatics in their barbaric homelands far from New Haven.

If a fraudulent “artist” wanted to submerge the most sacred symbol of the very Christianity which founded Yale in a jar of urine, they’d happily display it in the Yale Art Gallery. If some bolshevik crackpot wrote a play lovingly fantasizing about the assassination of President George W. Bush (Yale ’68), there’d be no problem performing it at the Yale Rep. But derogating anything pertinent to the amour propre of the genuine inferiors of modern European and American civilized humanity is intolerable because it would be violative of the new ultimate and supreme core principle of liberal modernity, the one inevitably trumping any and all other principles and values: ressentiment.

As long as the barbarian comes in the form of the aggrieved Caliban, blaming his condition and violent behavior on the actions and the contempt of the West, there is no length the cowardly intellectual clerisy of today’s establishment will not go to appease him.

Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.

The book’s author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reluctantly accepted Yale University Press’s decision not to publish the cartoons. But she was disturbed by the withdrawal of the other representations of Muhammad. All of those images are widely available, Ms. Klausen said by telephone, adding that “Muslim friends, leaders and activists thought that the incident was misunderstood, so the cartoons needed to be reprinted so we could have a discussion about it.” The book is due out in November.

John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.

He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books — like “The King Never Smiles” by Paul M. Handley, a recent unauthorized biography of Thailand’s current monarch — and “I’ve never blinked.” But, he said, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”

Mattheus van Beveren, Mohammed, leaning on his Koran, Trodden upon by Angels Bearing the Pulpit, Liebefraukirke, Dendermonde, Flanders, late 17th century