Interesting reprint ...

Google alerts me that The American Chronicle website has published Leonard Peikoff's "Religious Terrorism vs. Free Speech" with a dateline of February 21, 2006.

Perhaps they took their cue from the (highly recommended) Capitalism Magazine website, which republished the article on the 19th.

The 'Chronicle doesn't mention the article's over fifteen years old. The original topic was the fatwa issued by Iran, calling for death to Salman Rushdie, over his book The Satanic Verses.

As CapMag explains, "The Ayn Rand Institute is releasing this 1989 editorial--originally published as an advertisement in the New York Times--because the same essential issues underlie the Rushdie debacle and the current uproar over cartoons of Mohammad..."

A good read - and while some of us wish Dr. Peikoff was still publishing new material regularly, it's good to see how well his existing published work holds up, even on the journalistic side.

(Morbidly, though tellingly, there's now a website tracking the death toll due to violence over such cartoons. That bears repeating - the DEATH TOLL over CARTOONS. If anyone was confused over the moral issues involved here - what more need be said?)