All The News That's Fit To Study

National American journalist turned celebrity-blogger Michelle Malkin picks up on an article in The Boston Globe about how a conservative student newspaper at Harvard has become one of the first in the mainstream media to publish the Danish cartoons.

“A conservative student newspaper at Harvard University has become one of the few media outlets in the country to show inflammatory Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, angering students on campus and prompting a forum to discuss the controversy,” she reports. “The four cartoons appeared in the Feb. 8 issues of The Harvard Salient, a conservative, biweekly newspaper, under the headline, ‘A pox (err, jihad) on free expression.’ The student editors called the cartoons, including a sketch of Mohammed carrying a bomb in his turban, “relatively innocuous.””

This is not the first time Harvard or indeed any educational institution is going to face tough ethical calls over the publication of the pictures that have caused so much violent outrage. One of the central problems for Islam academics now with the Moslem reaction is that it has made what might have otherwise been a fairly trivial bit of prejudicial humour a crucial, highly photographic demonstration of Middle Eastern outrage at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and as such has inadvertently earned the debacle – and the cartoons themselves – a place in History, Political Science, Ethics and numerous other disciplines.

The consequence is that the incident is going to be taught from now on in a whole host of subjects, and that the prohibited cartoons themselves become a crucial part of that teaching. This conundrum will leave many academics once again wondering just how to reconcile political and religious correctness with the accurate pedagogical representation of their disciplines.