Harper's Magazine Publishes Danish Mohammed Cartoons

I haven't had the chance to see the new issue of Harper's magazine yet but Indigo Books has decided to pull it from their shelves.

Indigo Books and Music made the decision to remove the magazine from its 260 stores because it contains reprints of 12 cartoons that sparked outrage in the Muslim world earlier this year, according to a report in The Globe and Mail.

In addition to the 12 cartoons, the article also contains five cartoons that were inspired by an Iranian newspaper that called for an international Holocaust cartoon contest.

An internal memo obtained by the Globe advised Indigo staff to tell people "the decision was made based on the fact that the content about to be published has been known to ignite demonstrations around the world."

Why the magazine decided to publish these cartoons at this time is unknown.

UPDATE: The Globe and Mail has more:

Indigo Books and Music took the action this week when its executives noticed that the 10-page Harper's article, titled Drawing Blood, reproduced all 12 cartoons first published last September by Jyllands-Posten (The Morning Newspaper).

The article also contains five cartoons, including one by Mr. Spiegelman and two by Israelis, "inspired" by an Iranian newspaper's call in February for an international Holocaust cartoon contest "to test the limits of Western tolerance of free speech."
[...]
Harper's publisher John MacArthur said he was "genuinely shocked" by Indigo's action, in part because two large U.S. chains, Borders and Waldenbooks, are selling the issue.

(Three months ago, both chains yanked a small U.S. publication, Free Inquiry, when it reproduced four of the Danish cartoons. That Free Inquiry issue with the cartoons is currently on sale at Indigo.)

"I'd expect an American company to do this, not a Canadian," Mr. MacArthur said yesterday. "Even though you have tougher libel laws than us and your own versions of political correctness, to my mind [Canada] has always been a freer place for political discourse."

The U.S. news media have become "terribly prone to self-censorship," especially after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, he said. "There's a more wide open debate [in Canada] than in America."

Mr. MacArthur said Harper's decided to publish the Spiegelman article because "we really wanted to expand the conversation" about the role of cartoons and the contours of free expression and not just to say, 'So there.' "

In the article, Mr. Spiegelman -- perhaps best known as the creator of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Holocaust cartoon Maus -- rates each of the 12 Mohammed cartoons on a scale of 1 to 4 "fatwa bombs," and also includes several scabrous cartoons from the 19th and 20th centuries.

I thought we'd already had the 'free speech' discussion. Perhaps Mr MacArthur wasn't aware of the controversy in Canada when Conservative Ezra Levant published the Danish cartoons in his Western Standard Magazine in February.