Boycotting bookstores that boycott books?

Tim Blair reports that Borders and Waldenbooks are, as they say on the street, “not looking for no trouble” with the Uma — linking to this AP story that says the stores “will not stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries.” (Via IP.)

Now the blog post writes the rest of itself, right? We can just see the links. “Ron Coleman over at Dean’s World is calling for a boycott of….” Plus I put up a petition link, right? Great traffic generator — am I the first?

Let’s think about this instead. Do we expect bookstores to carry everything, regardless of offensiveness? I am sure not going to march for the right buy the Protocols of the Elders of Zion at Waldenbooks. Bookstores can make their choices in this regard, right?

Well, maybe not so fast. No one is suggesting that the bookstores should carry an edition of the cartoons themselves. This is a work that contains an article about — and evidently reproductions of — the cartoons. Certainly we don’t expect that bookstores will not stock books about Holocaust deniers or Protocol-liars, which would almost certainly contain excerpts and reproductions of the original, horrible works. They already do and no one thinks a thing about it.

Is religiously offensive material different? Only if you’re religious, or very sensitive to religious sensibilities. But the bookstores are packed, overflowing in fact, with books that criticize, abuse and demean religion; if they made that a section of the average Barnes & Noble it would take up the whole downstairs, so they distribute them in other categories!

No, the nub of it here is that the magazine won’t be carried “because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries.” They’re not really covering up or even, I think, suggesting that Muslims were the victims of these riots in any morally meaningful sense.

What they’re saying is, “Sorry. We don’t want riots in our stores, okay? We don’t want our directors kidnapped. We don’t want our employees blown up.” Tim Blair think that makes them contemptible chickens. Glenn Reynolds calls them cowards. You know what? On my Likelihood of Confusion blog, where free speech is one of my thematic topics, I have still not reproduced the cartoons. I have a family, people. I can’t make a stand on this (supposedly) moral point; I’m not dying on this hill; and as a religious person myself, by the way, I’m not necessarily interested in promoting mockery of the founders of religions in the public forum. (But see here.)

Indeed as a strictly orthodox Jew I have more in common with moderate Muslims than with atheistic, cynical Western Europeans on more than one topic. Violence isn’t one of them, no; but my worldview and that of my religious tradition is that you don’t stick your finger in the other guy’s eye every time you think you can get away with it or have “right” to do it. And when there’s a real question whether you can get away with it… better to choose life and live to blog, to sell books, and to fix the world some other way. It’s not as if everyone hasn’t already gotten the point here.

So you can boycott Waldenbooks and Borders, and I’m not sure you’d be wrong to do so. I myself never shop there anyway, so my pronouncement on the matter would be so much chin music. Bloggers have been accused of occcasionally overestimating their importance in the scheme of things. Sitting safely at a computer at an undisclosed location, it’s easy to be a hero. But I think we can and should recognize that these aren’t such easy decisions for brick-and-mortar businesses responsible to stockholders, employees, customers, suppliers and their host communities to make. If God forbid something terrible happens to a bookstore employee in the store that took the brave and moral stand, will the brave bloggers write the letter of consolation to that persons’ family?

I’m open to persuasion on this. I realize this position represents a moral compromise. But my guess is that people who own businesses and homes, who have families and friends in the real and vulnerable world, will recognize that you have to pick your battles. Waldenbooks and Borders are only book stores. I don’t expect the Department of State to be so cautious. But how many armored divisions does Borders have?

Does every mall need to have barbed wire around the food court, checkpoints at the ATM’s and metal detectors at Hot Sam’s, all so we can make fun of the Prophet everywhere, all the time?

UPDATE: See here for more along the lines of this perspective.