Earlier this week, Hanif Kureishi, the Whitbread Award-winning author of the novels The Buddha of Suburbia (Viking, 1990) and Intimacy (Scribner, 1999), among others, accused the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) of censorship after it dropped a radio broadcast of one of his short stories. BBC executives felt that "Weddings and Beheadings," a story about a cameraman who is forced to film executions in the Middle East, too closely mirrored recent events. Within days the London-based magazine Index on Censorship published Kureishi's story on its Web site so that readers could judge for themselves whether "Weddings and Beheadings" is offensive.
