Liberals Love to Ban Books-Freedom Of Speech? No Way
The Democrat party has abandoned whatever claim it once had to being the party of the First Amendment. Regrettably, examples of Democrats selling out the First Amendment are becoming more prevalent and the few champions of freedom of speech and expression left in the party are getting more difficult to find.
To Ban a Book
by Winfield Myers
FrontPage Magazine
December 3, 2008
Political correctness is at its most parodic precisely when it seems beyond parody. The latest bit of history to support this adage is the Middle East studies establishment’s reception of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina (Jewel), a life of Aisha, the favorite wife of Muhammad.
As Robert Spencer writes in his review of Jewel for the Winter 2009 issue of the Middle East Quarterly, Jones set out to “be a bridge-builder” who chose her historical sources selectively to ensure that her work would present a flattering picture of her subjects.
Enter Denise Spellberg, who teaches Islamic history at the University of Texas.
She heard of Jewel pre-publication because Jones, in her naiveté, asked her then-publisher Ballantine, an imprint of Random House, to obtain an endorsement from Spellberg to splay across the back of the dust jacket. Spellberg is author of Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of Aisha bint Abi Bakr, which Jones cites as one of her sources.
She is, in addition, a typical practitioner of the blatant bias toward things Muslim and, more particularly, Arab that has become almost ubiquitous among practitioners of Middle East studies. Put simply but accurately, this means that things Arab/Muslim = good; things American/Western = bad. Under this regime, dispassionate, fair-minded research that takes a critical look at the Middle East is more likely to be rewarded with professional ostracism than advancement.
The results of Spellberg’s fantasy-laden reading of the publisher’s galleys of Jewel is by now familiar: she threw a Texas-sized tantrum and effectively persuaded Random House (the publisher of her forthcoming Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an) to withdraw publication of the book.According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, Spellberg made a “frantic” phone call to Muslim friend Shahed Amanullah, who owns the popular site altmuslim.
After telling him the novel “made fun of Muslims and their history” and asking him to sound the alarm, word spread rapidly that Random House was on the verge of publishing a book on Islam that would spark worldwide violence akin to what occurred in the aftermath of the publication of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad and Salmon Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.
