'Every Journalist' Should Publish Them

News from Agape Press: "Western Standard editor Ezra Levant considers the cartoon controversy the most prominent worldwide news story right now -- and he thinks it is absurd to tell the story without showing his readers the cartoons in question.
'If you're a news magazine and you want to tell your readers about the story, you've got to show the cartoons,' Levant says bluntly. 'So we did what I think every journalist should do.'

But every journalist did not publish the cartoons -- and Levant has a word for them. 'I don't think we did anything abnormal. I think the abnormal acts were by other editors, publishers, and producers across North America who decided to self-censor,' he offers. 'They're the ones with the explaining to do.'

Meanwhile, the Canadian journalist says he is not concerned about the threats from an Islamic organization to seek 'hate crime' charges against his publication.

'The first instinct of Muslims -- instead of debating or rebutting or writing a letter to the editor ... is to call the cops, to go to the police, to go to the courts as if they're still back in Saudi Arabia where the Quran is the law, where the country is under Sharia law,' he says. Levant believes that is the wrong approach in a free society -- and Muslim immigrants, he says, must understand that Canada is not Saudi Arabia.

'That's what's frustrating to me,' he says. '[T]hese newcomers to Canada, who happen to be Muslim ... are not adopting our Western traditions of free speech and respect for non-Muslims.'

And his stance, he claims, has nothing to do with any ill will toward Muslims in general. 'I don't mind if a Muslim practices his own faith,' he shares. 'But I'm not Muslim, and I don't want to be subordinated to it. So when a Muslim organization demands I not publish these cartoons and goes to the cops to enforce that, that's wrong -- and he's got to understand that."