Martin Kramer’s post about the decision by Yale University Press to remove the Danish Muhammad cartoons from a book about the Danish Muhammad cartoons is very much worth your time. Hugh Fitzgerald’s post is also excellent.
As Martin reveals, one of the central figures who ensured the censorship of the cartoons is Prof. Marcia Inhorn, the head of Yale’s Middle East Studies department, which I wrote about for this website last year. Martin links to a piece Inhorn wrote in 2006 that is really a model of the genre:
I recently returned from a trip to Lebanon, the UAE and Iran—what most Americans would consider a journey into the heart of darkness, a veritable “axis of evil”. In fact, the trip was far from perilous, and I was treated as an honoured guest in every setting. . . .
I have travelled widely and lived with my family for extended periods of time in Egypt, Lebanon, and the UAE. It saddens me that so few Americans will ever come to know the delights of the Middle East as my family and I have.
Inhorn is not simply agnostic on the question of the Iranian regime—she actually admires it because the mullahs allow in vitro fertilization and birth control:
These developments convince me of the need to recognise the “high-modern” nature of Iran, which is currently on the “cutting edge” of developments in reproductive science and technology. It also bespeaks the need to de-vilify—indeed, de-demonise—the Shiite Muslim clergy, who are condoning these various innovations, but who are generally represented as backward and fanatical in the Western media.