Tim Rutten deserves credit for his excellent column yesterday decrying Big Media silence on the latest threats to Salman Rushdie:

If you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it’s because there haven’t been any. And, in that great silence, is a great scandal.

I love the ending:

What masquerades as tolerance and cultural sensitivity among many U.S. journalists is really a kind of soft bigotry, an unspoken assumption that Muslim societies will naturally repress great writers and murder honest journalists, and that to insist otherwise is somehow intolerant or insensitive.

Lost in the self-righteous haze that masks this expedient sentiment is a critical point once made by the late American philosopher Richard Rorty, who was fond of pointing out that “some ideas, like some people, are just no damn good” and that no amount of faux tolerance or misplaced fellow feeling excuses the rest of us from our obligation to oppose such ideas and such people.

If Western and, particularly American, commentators refuse to speak up when their obligations are so clear, the fanatics will win and the terrible silence they so fervently desire will descend over vast stretches of our world — a silence in which the only permissible sounds are the prayers of the killers and the cries of their victims.

Read it all.

UPDATE: I quoted an additional paragraph from Rutten’s column to make clear that he is talking about the lack of columns and editorials.

Captain Ed, who initially decried the Sopranos ending, seems to be coming around. He has an interpretation that is interesting, and a little different from the ones I have heard so far.

Spoilers tucked in the extended entry, for those of you who plan to watch it all on Netflix in the future.

(more…)