From Ron Silver.

Since 2001 it has become apparent to me that many people are indeed afraid. It has also become apparent to me that the people who are most afraid are behaving hypocritically and cowardly. I do not make these assertions lightly. It’s a horrible thing to call a person or persons cowardly. A little less so with hypocrisy, a little bit of which attaches to all of us. Cowards, in that the fear of confronting the real enemy who wishes us harm is displaced by ranting against a liberal democracy where they know no harm will come to them. Is it so heroic to make a film or a speech that has the support of everyone in your community? What kind of courage does it take to go after the Bush administration if you’re a member of the Hollywood community, and most everyone agrees with your position and will reward you for it — or you’re part of the political class in Washington, D.C. or in New York or in parts of California? Forget the tenured and not so tenured academics, who while not being able to change the world in 1968 have devoted their lives to teaching future generations about the evils of the one, seemingly dispensable sovereign nation that evidently makes the world unlivable. Our country.

When a novelist has a death sentence on his head, when a filmmaker is shot in the street and then stabbed through the heart for making a film that the murderers found offensive, when newspaper editors and publishers, as well as network executives, refuse to show us the cartoons that created havoc and mass protests around the world, I think something more than good taste is involved. The reason we haven’t seen the cartoons in the New York Times (apparently this was news that wasn’t fit to print) or Newsweek, or on our TV screens, is fear. Of what? Pissing them off? From my perspective they are apparently quite pissed off already.

RTWT