Four years ago, the Western Standard was one of the only media in Canada (or indeed North America) to show our readers the news of the season, namely the Danish cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammed. Those cartoons were newsworthy because they had “caused” rioting around the world that killed nearly 250 people in the month of February, 2006, alone.

You can see all the cartoons here. This one is probably the most famous, drawn by Kurt Westergaard:

Advertisement

None of the major TV networks or daily newspapers in Canada published the cartoons, and many of them came up with disappointing excuses as to why they didn’t. Here was the CBC’s weak excuse for not showing them on TV, but I really shouldn’t pick on them, because few others showed them.

Well, imagine my delight when this TV clip was brought to my attention. CTV’s Roger Smith was reporting on a foiled assassination attempt against Westergaard — and not only was Westergaard’s cartoon displayed clearly for a few seconds, but the entire page of Mohammed cartoons was briefly shown as well.

That shouldn’t be remarkable — it’s just plain old journalism to show TV viewers the central image in a story about a cartoon. But, given the nearly uniform, self-imposed censorship of 2006, it’s worth congratulating CTV, Smith and his producers. Good for them — and good for all of us.

Hey, that puts Canadian TV one up on the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University.

Incidentally, the Objectivist-themed New Individualist magazine, which ran several of my articles, also featured the above cartoon on one of their covers back in 2006, making them one of a very few magazines in the US to run the cartoon. And Ezra Levant’s efforts to break the back of Canadian censorship was the subject of my very first Silicon Graffiti video, in January of 2008.

For much more on The Cartoons That Dare Not Show Their Face, scroll through “The Cartoon Kingdom” archives on the original iteration of my blog.

(H/T: 5′F)