One of the New York Pressies who quit over their backdown on the cartoons was Jonathan Leaf, occasional writer for us, and author of The Caterers, a play he wrote several years ago which was presciently about this very issue. (I saw an early version of it, and it’s dynamite).

Where please is the New York media? The Sun printed a couple of the cartoons; too bad nobody reads it. But the Post? The Daily News? Pinch can print Jason Blair, but he can’t cover the major international media related news story of the year so far?

In 1814, former president Jefferson’s Philadelphia book dealer had some trouble securing a French astronomical work on the creation of the world. Jefferson wrote this:

“Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason.”