I think the Index on Censorship website is a good thing. Censorship, whether open or covert, prevents us from making informed judgements and, in doings so, subverts the democratic process. There are, of course, other means of managing and distorting public opinion but the website provides a small bastion against the encroaching darkness.
However, Sherry Kones, the author of the book Jewel of Medina, who protests there, may not provide the most outrageous case against censorship because there is the other relevant issue that her book is, by all accounts, really bad. Jonathan Moeller's blog offers quite a thoughtful condemnation of the craven publishers in the face of self-appointed Islamists, albeit the author's daughter took exception to his description of the book as trashy. However, even the couple of lines he quotes from it are sufficient to persuade the reader that the book really is trashy, which may have contributed to a lack of any rush to publish it. Nonetheless, she does seem to have got publishers and the more noise she makes the more sales she achieves. Amazon UK and USA both show it ranking just below 50,000th in their sales rankings, which is not bad for a boddice-ripper
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