“Ms. Hakakian…said that the heart of the Rushdie case is ‘being able to say that we, as writers, as novelists, as thinkers, can absolutely take on any issue we want in our works — and that includes Islam.’”
This you, New York Times? “The Conservative Force Behind Speeches Roiling College Campuses,” by Stephanie Saul, New York Times, May 20, 2017:
BUFFALO — “Let’s give it up for the racists that are hosting this event!” someone yelled, and the crowd roared, foot-stomping in unison, then breaking into song: Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” One member of the audience held up a sign, “Queers Against Islamaphobia.” Another unfurled a banner: “Muslims Welcome. Fascists Get Out.”
Close to 200 students kept up the noise for more than an hour in a University at Buffalo lecture hall on May 1, mostly drowning out the evening’s featured speaker, Robert Spencer, a conservative author and blogger who espouses a dark view of Islam….
When he was able to talk above the noise, Mr. Spencer cited excerpts from the Quran as evidence that the text is used as justification for violence.
Again: this you, New York Times? “To Fight Radical Islam, U.S. Wants Muslim Allies,” by Scott Shane, New York Times, August 3, 2011:
…The F.B.I. document recommended two books by Robert Spencer, an anti-Muslim blogger and author whose work was repeatedly cited in the online manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian accused of killing at least 76 people last month. Mr. Spencer, who operates the Web site Jihad Watch, has said he opposes violence and condemns Mr. Breivik’s actions….
So now the ability to criticize Islam and jihad is a crucial component of the freedom of speech? Where do I go to get my reputation back?
But of course, the New York Times doesn’t really mean that opposition to jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women is now acceptable. They’re just signaling that it may be allowed on a limited basis from people who are reliably Leftist, such as Rushdie himself, but if people who dissent from the Leftist agenda dare to criticize Islam, the Times will be out with its torches and pitchforks warning about “Islamophobia” again.
“The Stabbing of Salman Rushdie Renews Free Speech Debates,” by Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times, August 15, 2022
Two years ago Salman Rushdie joined prominent cultural figures signing an open letter decrying an increasingly “intolerant climate” and warning that the “free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.” It was a declaration of principles Mr. Rushdie had embodied since 1989, when a fatwa by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, calling for his murder, made him a reluctant symbol of free speech….
In the West, the defense of Mr. Rushdie was hardly universally robust. Former president Jimmy Carter, writing in The New York Times in 1989, denounced the fatwa but charged Rushdie with “vilifying” the Prophet Muhammad and “defaming” the Quran.
“While Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms are important,” he wrote, “we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah’s irresponsibility.”…
Some who weighed in said the stakes are simply too high — and too personal. After the attack, Roya Hakakian, an Iranian American writer who in 2019 was warned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that she had been targeted by Iran, took to Twitter on Saturday to assail what she said was a lack of swift condemnation from U.S. government officials….
In an interview on Sunday, Ms. Hakakian, who came to the United States as a refugee in 1984, said that the heart of the Rushdie case is “being able to say that we, as writers, as novelists, as thinkers, can absolutely take on any issue we want in our works — and that includes Islam.”
But “nobody is saying that,” she said. Instead, “people are paying lip service to free speech.”
In his recent autobiographical novel “Homeland Elegies,” the American writer Ayad Akhtar reflects on the complex meanings of the “Satanic Verses” controversy for Muslim readers and writers, including himself.
In an email on Sunday, Mr. Akhtar, who is PEN America’s current president, said the attack on Mr. Rushdie is “a reminder that ‘harms’ of speech and the freedom of speech do not, cannot, hold equal claims on us.”
“While we may rightly acknowledge that speech can harm,” he said, “it’s in the terrible culmination of Salman’s dilemma that we see the paramount value, the absolute centrality of freedom of thought and the freedom to express that thought.”
For many, defending Mr. Rushdie and “The Satanic Verses” against his would-be assassins may be easy, Mr. Akhtar said. But the defense also “has to apply where we have less unanimity, where we are more implicated.”
“That’s what it means,” he said, “for it to be a principle.”
