The Times commentator David Aaronovitch was quick off the mark in denouncing the cowardice and self-censorship of the British press following the harrowing events in Paris.
In his excellent piece the day after, he said we should mock: “the cretinous notion that a deity who supposedly made the universe, the world and everything in it would give a fart in a gale about whether an insignificant speck of humanity drew a picture of a man in a turban and called it Muhammad?”
While others have asked: Where is our equivalent of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine?
Why did none of our national papers, normally so full of bombast, not dare to print a single cartoon from it on their front pages?
Poor Private Eye, the country’s leading satirical magazine, looked to be offering very small gruel indeed with its front cover pictures mocking Prince Andrew’s recent difficulties, compared to Charlie’s offending one of the world’s leading religions.
The problem is that mocking the Church of England is unlikely to result in a newspaper’s offices being firebombed or worse.
It’s easy to mock the BBC and our Press for failing to show the cartoons but it is not an easy decision – putting one’s colleagues at risk is about as big a judgment as it’s possible to make. And there are good cultural reasons too why newspapers think twice before offending Muslim sensibilities.
It might be cowardly but it is also a question of good taste.
Gratuitously offending part of our population can all too easily look like straightforward bullying. As a confused Catholic girl who attended a Je Suis Charlie rally told The Times: “It’s terrible these cartoonists died but I don’t actually want to see the cartoons.
“There’s nothing funny about them – they are offensive...it feels like we are picking on Muslims.”
And there’s the long shadow of the Salman Rushdie affair too.
Not easy being a newspaper editor, sometimes.
