The Phoenix Cuts to the Quick

Via Dhimmi Watch:

Jeff Jacoby published this article in today's Boston Globe about The Phoenix's explanation why it didn't run the Muhammad Cartoons:

THE PHOENIX is Boston's leading ''alternative" newspaper, the kind of brash, pull-no-punches weekly that might have been expected to print without hesitation the Mohammed cartoons that Islamists have been using to incite rage and riots across the Muslim world. Its willingness to push the envelope was memorably demonstrated in 2002, when it broke with most media to publish a grisly photograph of Daniel Pearl's severed head, and supplied a link on its website to the sickening video of the Wall Street Journal reporter's beheading.

But the Phoenix isn't publishing the Mohammed drawings, and in a brutally candid editorial it explained why.

''Our primary reason," the editors confessed, is ''fear of retaliation from . . . bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do . . . Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and . . . could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year-publishing history."

Jacoby says the Phoenix is "capitulating to fear."

But is it? Commenters on Dhimmi Watch blog offered their thoughts:

I think this is an effective way to express the problems with Islam. If a paper is not going to publish the cartoons, this frank honesty emphasizing Islamic terror is about as good as it gets. What's CAIR going to do, call them Islamophobes?

I think CAIR should take up this case and force them to publish so they do not get away with saying Islam is violent. I'm sure CAIR will stop this PeodoProphetPhobia by "persuading" them to publish under threat of litigation.

Brilliant move by The Phoenix. CAIR is effectively neutralized and the the establishment media ends up looking even more pathetic than before.

Did The Phoenix just put Islamic groups, like CAIR, between a rock and a hard place? How are Islamic groups supposed to react to an allegation of being "bloodthirsty"? They certainly can't argue Islam isn't violent, not when the world is on fire, as Michelle Malkin rightly puts it, 16 Christians are dead in Nigeria, and an $11 million bounty is on the heads of the cartoonists.