Borders Customer Care
100 Phoenix Drive
Ann Arbor, MI 48108-2202
888-812-6657

ccare@bordersstores.com


March 30, 2006

Dear Borders representatives:

After reading this, please forward it to the appropriate Borders executive. Be advised also that I am circulating this message far and wide, and posting it online on my blog:

     http://bidinotto.journalspace.com/?entryid=366

I have been a loyal Borders customer -- now a Borders Rewards customer -- for quite a few years. I spend many hundreds of dollars annually in your store.

However, I have just learned that Borders and its affiliated Waldenbooks have banned the next issue of a publication, Free Inquiry, from your magazine shelves, because that publication is reprinting the controversial Danish cartoons of Muhammad on inside pages. The reason given by Borders is alleged fear of violence from radical Muslims, and desire to "protect" customers and employees.

Your company's craven policy of capitulation in the face of the mere hypothetical threat of terrorism is absolutely appalling -- a complete moral abdication that only encourages those threatening our rights and liberties.

I am a writer, and the editor of The New Individualist, a news and cultural magazine. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, I am the first editor in the nation to dare to print one of those "offensive" cartoons of Muhammad right on the cover of our Winter 2006 issue. I therefore have no doubt that our magazine, which is still available only by subscription, would have been banned by Borders, too.

Let me be clear: I did not publish the cartoon to offend Muslims. I did so as a profound matter of principle: to stand up to those who are trying to annihilate our First Amendment rights. I did so because here, in America, nobody can be permitted to get away with coercion and intimidation against anyone's freedom to write and speak and publish. I did so because I learned many years ago, as a child on school playgrounds, that when you surrender to bullies, you grant them dictatorial power over your life.

By its public declaration of pre-emptive surrender, Borders has given the bullies of our age a clear message: Your intimidation works. Your bullying works. Your coercion works. Your terrorist threats work.

Borders has set a morally irresponsible and frighteningly dangerous precedent. It has told fanatics everywhere that all they need to do in order to obliterate First Amendment rights is to growl menacingly -- at which point a leading bookstore chain in America will clear its shelves of anything that could possibly offend the thug of the moment.

Having now encouraged the use of violence and intimidation, which magazine or book are you next prepared to expunge from your stores? Will you remove books about abortion, for fear of provoking some "right to life" fanatic? Will you eliminate Jewish magazines or black publications, for fear of upsetting neo-Nazis and skinheads? Scientology has been known to intimidate critics; are you about to bow to their demands for "proper" treatment in magazines and books, by eliminating all critical material? Or if some investigative journalist probes organized crime, will you hide his work in the back room, for fear of retaliation from the Mob?

You have given a sorry example of where such capitulation begins. But where does it end?

Not only is your policy ethically disgusting and counter-productive, it is completely nonsensical. With many thousands of book and magazine outlets in this country, there is absolutely no reason for Borders to believe that its stores, staff, and customers would be singled out for harm. Yet despite all of this, Borders does stand out: as the first and most gutless of them all. It is the first American bookstore chain to adopt a policy that I have labeled "anticipatory capitulation": advance surrender in the face of a mere hypothetical threat.

Terrorism and fanaticism are the gravest menaces of our age. Our nation is dispatching thousands of soldiers abroad to meet that threat to our liberty and our modern way of life. But after 9/11, it should be clear that all of us -- not just our soldiers -- are on the front lines of this war.

If we value our rights and freedoms, all of us must stand together and resolute in the face of threats, intimidation, and violence. The worst possible message we can give to terrorists or to anyone else willing to initiate force is that we do not stand united against them -- and that their tactics work.

I exhort you to rescind immediately this contemptible cut-and-run policy. Until and unless that happens, be advised that I will no longer be shopping in your stores, and that I will encourage everyone I know to do likewise.


Sincerely,

Robert Bidinotto, Editor

The New Individualist
www.newindividualist.com

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UPDATE -- Why, of all bookstore chains, is Borders the only one to cave in to the caliphs? Hmmm...does anyone think, like me, that THIS might explain anything? Read this early February Borders news release, then connect the dots, folks.

UPDATE #2 -- From the Borders Web site: "For information on products, promotions, or trends, please contact Beth Bingham at 734-477-4457 or bbingham@bordersgroupinc.com."

UPDATE #3 -- And here are the rest of the suits running Borders. (Hat tip to Don Baldino.)

UPDATE #4 -- More groveling to the Islamists by Borders reported at LittleGreenFootballs.

UPDATE #5 -- Welcome, visitors from Michelle Malkin's blog, from Samizdata,  from Memeorandum, from Ed Driscoll (in fact, more than once), from the upper reaches of the Atlasphere, and once again from the fearless VodkaPundit. There's plenty more here for you to like; check it out.

UPDATE #6 -- And a warm welcome to the gadzillions of you also visiting here from the LittleGreenFootballs site, and from Pam's Atlas Shrugs blog.... Folks, this is unreal: visitors pouring in here at the rate of about 20 per minute. It's extraordinarily gratifying that so many of you are taking this issue so seriously, and are communicating your displeasure with the suits at Borders.

It IS serious -- deadly serious: our fundamental right to freedom of expression is at stake here. How many more bookstores, universities (NYU is the latest), publishers, TV networks, newspapers, and others in the business of transmitting ideas are going to submit to this naked intimidation...and then, in turn, compel their employees, reporters, commentators, editors, students, and faculties to shut up and go along with the jihadists' demands?

Pardon me, I thought I was living in America...not Germany circa 1940.


Are the lights now dhimming at Borders?

UPDATE #7 -- This has been a record-setting visitor day for this blog, which is both a tribute to readers' sense of justice, and to the anger generated against a quote American unquote company for playing footsie with America's enemies. Judging from the "comments" posted below by readers of this entry -- and by the many similar comments I've seen posted at other sites today -- Borders has one BIG public relations debacle on its hands.

Good. It's time that those who would so cheaply sell out their freedom (and ours) paid a price for it.

UPDATE #8, March 31 -- Welcome, all ye thundering hordes from Instapundit. (Now we've really hit the big time. Look out, Borders...) Ah yes: I also see I've been linked from the Religion of Peace, from Kesher Talk, and from Gates of Vienna, all of whom are dispatching their own troops here. Stick around, folks -- I'm just getting wound up...

UPDATE #9, March 31 -- Help Save Free Speech In Canada. The Western Standard, the ONLY magazine that had the...ahem...guts to publish the Danish cartoons in Canada, has been hit up with a lawsuit from a raving nutcase Islamist imam. Of course, government being what it is, the Alberta Human Rights Commission has actually taken up the case, costing the publication many thousands for its legal defense. If you want to do something PRACTICAL on behalf of free speech -- besides, of course, subscribing to The New Individualist (the first U.S. mag to publish the "offending" cartoon on its COVER) -- why don't you toss  a few bucks into the legal defense fund for The Western Standard, too? Thanks.

UPDATE #10 -- Heh. You've gotta love the PhotoShop image of Borders posted at InDC Journal: just scroll down the entry. Perfect. [Oops...it's suddenly vanished. But the post is worth reading, anyway.]

UPDATE #11, March 31 -- Now Sissy Willis weighs in with a nice roundup. And thanks for the plug, Sissy. Back atcha... Also, hi to those coming in from Pajamasmedia. Greetings, too, to those filing in from Opinion Source and from TailRank. (Opinion Source, thanks also for positioning your link right above that of nihilistic twit Jeremy Rifken.)

UPDATE #12, March 31 -- Now posted online: Ed  Hudgins's feature article, "The Jihad Against Free Speech," reprinted from the blasphemous issue of The New Individualist that first introduced the cowering U.S. print media to the face of Muhammad. Among other things, Ed explains the nature -- and limits -- of "tolerance" in a free society.

UPDATE #13, March 31 -- Also now available online: "Cartoon Journalists" -- my own scathing indictment of the cowardice and capitulation by the mainstream media in the face of Islamist bullying. If you like your meat red, you will love this one; I suggest accompanying it with a glass of Rosemount Shiraz.

The Shape of Things to Come?

UPDATE #14, March 31 -- The fatwas against freedom continue. No doubt encouraged by the spineless groveling from Western media and other institutions, 27 Muslim groups in Denmark have filed a "defamation" lawsuit against Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that commissioned and printed the Muhammad cartoons. Add this to the aforementioned lawsuit against the Western Standard in Canada, and we can see how radical Islamists are seeking to silence all critics. And if they can't do it in the courts, we see that they are eager to take their violent intimidation to the streets.

Such is our own future here, in the United States, if our invertebrate "opinion leaders" continue on low road of appeasement, and thus continue to encourage and empower the new barbarians.

UPDATE #15, March 31 -- And now for something completely different: a hilarious spoof of an "official" reply from a Borders exec to bloggers (including Yours Truly). I don't know which made me laugh harder -- the put-on, or the fact that some of the dimwits commenting on this post actually believed it and took it seriously.

UPDATE #16, March 31 -- Michael Weiss at SLATE has also taken notice of these words now. I take that as another sign that the message is getting through.

UPDATE #17, April 2 -- Welcome to you people coming in from Daimnation. Also to those wandering over from Dr. Sanity's blog, which is headquartered, I see, right in the neighborhood of the Borders home office in Ann Arbor. Pat, why don't you head over there and see if they've circled their cars in a defensive perimeter around the building, then report back?

UPDATE #18, April 3 -- Brian Doherty over at "Hit and Run" commented today and linked here. Also, Joe Katzman over at Winds of Change quotes my open letter to Borders and adds an amen. Thanks.

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