After reading Roger Kimball’s account from Friday, I had some pangs of regret about mypost of Thursday, which was unkind to the author of the purged book. As I put it: “The author, Brandeis’s Prof. Jyett Jytte Klausen, is said to have ‘reluctantly accepted’ the decision — evidently, being published by Yale is more important than what is published by Yale.” But After reading Diana West’s latest, I don’t feel so badly.
As Diana notes, the Danish press reports that “Klausen does not think it is a matter of principe [to have the cartoons published]. ‘If there is a real danger, the cartoons should be removed from the book. I am not Geert Wilders.’”
Truer words were never spoken. While she’s doubtless miffed at the wringer Yale put her through, the good professor is no hero. Nor is it surprising that she capitulated to Yale’s capitulation. In an earlier post, Diana had observed:
[T]here is irony in the fact that the book itself is unlikely to be a resounding smack-down of Islamic dictates on speech and artistic expression in the Western world. As Thomas Landen of Brussels Journal points out in an excellent piecehere, the book’s author, Jytte Klausen, a leftist Danish-born professor at Brandeis, was one of the “experts” cited in Newsweek’s cover-story last month downplaying and dimissing the Islamization of Europe, along with anyone fighting it.
And now, in her later analysis, Diana provides the pièce de résistance: Yale’s surrender to sharia, and Prof. Klausen’s going along for the ride, “completely undermines the thesis of her own book.” That thesis was described by YUP:
[Prof. Klausen] concludes that the Muslim reaction to the cartoons was not—as was commonly assumed—a spontaneous emotional reaction arising out of the clash of Western and Islamic civilizations. Rather it was orchestrated, first by those with vested interests in elections in Denmark and Egypt, and later by Islamic extremists seeking to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya, and Nigeria. Klausen shows how the cartoon crisis was, therefore, ultimately a political conflict rather than a colossal cultural misunderstanding.
(Emphasis in bold by Diana.) Really? To the contrary, it’s left to Diana to provide the lux et veritas:
Leaving aside the inadequate assessment of what was “commonly assumed” about Motoon Rage, the book’s point seems clear: Klausen is arguing that the murder and mayhem and boycotts were merely overseas domestic politics in action, not umma-wide manifestations of Islamic rage, “orchestrated” or not, over a breach in sharia in Denmark. According to her own thesis, then, publishing the cartoons in an academic context should certainly not trigger — what was it that “was commonly assumed”? — anything resembling “a spontaneous emotional reaction arising out of the clash of Western and Islamic civilizations.”
Exactly right. Klausen and Yale decided the politic thing to do was surrender Western freedom and rationality in not the face of but the presumption of Islamic intolerance.
