It has been fun watching the censorious, authoritarian and Islamophilic Left tie itself into knots defending the freedom of speech it otherwise despises in the wake of the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. This New Yorker piece is a good example. Adam Gopnik asserts that “Rushdie should have been equally invulnerable to persecution had he written an actual anti-Muslim—or an anti-Christian—diatribe,” but goes out of his way several times to assure us that he actually meant no insult to Islam, that The Satanic Verses isn’t “an anti-Muslim invective,” and that Rushdie is actually as Islamophilic as any Leftist intellectual is supposed to be these days.
The import of all this is clear. Gopnik is not saying that those who do write “anti-Muslim invectives” should not be allowed to publish, or that they should be subjected to violence. I don’t know of any such books, anyway; mine are only characterized as such by those who have not read them and would never dare to do so. But the thrust of what Gopnik is saying is that the authors of such invectives should be safe, but that they will never be celebrated in the New Yorker. Gopnik can only make Salman Rushdie palatable to his far-Left audience by showing that Rushdie did not insult Islam and in fact holds it in high regard. Otherwise, he would only have ever been mentioned in the New Yorker in the course of some condemnation of “Islamophobia.”
If, however, Rushdie had produced a sacrilegious anti-Christian invective, the New Yorker would have no trouble hailing and lauding him, even in the absence of any threats or assassination attempt.
“Salman Rushdie and the Power of Words,” by Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, August 13, 2022
The terrorist assault on Salman Rushdie on Friday morning, in western New York, was triply horrific to contemplate….
Second, it was horrific in the madness of its meaning and a reminder of the power of religious fanaticism to move people. Authorities did not immediately release a motive for the attack, but the dark apprehension is that the terrorist who assaulted Rushdie was a radicalized Islamic militant of American upbringing—like John Updike’s imaginary terrorist in the novel “Terrorist,” apparently one raised in New Jersey—who was executing a fatwa first decreed by Ayatollah Khomeini, in 1989, upon the publication of Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses.” The evil absurdity of the death sentence pronounced on Rushdie for having written a book actually more exploratory than sacrilegious—in no sense an anti-Muslim invective, but a kind of magical-realist meditation on themes from the Quran—was always obvious. (Of course, Rushdie should have been equally invulnerable to persecution had he written an actual anti-Muslim—or an anti-Christian—diatribe, but, as it happens, he hadn’t.)…
Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a figure involved in the U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, announced on Twitter that he “won’t be shedding tears for a writer who spouts endless hatred & contempt for Muslims & Islam.”
Of course, Rushdie did no such thing….
(We met when we walked through the great 1992 Matisse show at moma together, at the height of the threat, and he was full of delight in each painting as it passed, with a nice, fully developed if slightly ironic sense of how much Matisse had drawn on Islamic civilization, on Persian ornaments and North African textiles, for his inspiration.)…
Efforts will be made, are bound to be made, to somehow equalize or level the acts of Rushdie and his tormentors and would-be executioners—to imply that though somehow the insult to Islam might have been misunderstood or overstated, still one has to see the insult from the point of view of the insulted. This is a doubly despicable viewpoint, not only because there was no actual insult offered but also because the right to be insulting about other people’s religions—or their absence of one—is a fundamental right, part of the inheritance of the human spirit. Without that right of open discourse, intellectual life devolves into mere cruelty and power seeking….
The idea—which has sprung to dangerous new life in America as much on the progressive as on the theocratic side of the argument—that words are equal to actions reflects the most primitive form of word magic, and has the same relation to the actual philosophy of language that astrology has to astronomy. Sticks and stones really can break bones….
