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Till the horrible assault on Salman Rushdie final weekend, it was tempting to imagine that the “Rushdie affair” had been consigned to historical past. The unique fatwa towards the writer was issued greater than three many years in the past — by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was then Iran’s supreme chief. However in recent times, the menace towards Rushdie had appeared to recede. The novelist took to the stage in New York state final Friday unprotected by safety.
Pointedly, when he was attacked Rushdie was giving a speech concerning the significance of defending writers in peril. Over the many years, the novelist has turn into each an emblem and a champion of freedom of speech. Free speech stays a core precept of a liberal society. It must be defended with much more vehemence within the aftermath of the assault on Rushdie.
Khomeini’s fatwa marked a harmful departure from international norms. Right here was the chief of a state calling for the demise of a overseas citizen over a piece of fiction, The Satanic Verses, which the cleric deemed blasphemous. Giving in to a menace like that, by withdrawing the novel, would have been profoundly harmful to free speech world wide.
Even when the quick menace to Rushdie seemed diminished in recent times, the menace to free speech posed by Islamist extremists, each Shia and Sunni, has by no means disappeared. The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was murdered in 1991. Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker, was murdered in 2004. In 2015, extremists murdered 12 people on the Paris places of work of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical journal.
Threats proceed. Final month a person was arrested after being discovered with a loaded assault rifle outdoors the New York house of Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-American ladies’s rights activist.
On many events, voices within the west certified condemnation of assaults with recommendations that the likes of Rushdie, Van Gogh or the editors of Charlie Hebdo had additionally been at fault by being gratuitously offensive to Muslims. A few of those that did not help Rushdie within the Nineties have been conservatives, who had lengthy disliked his leftwing views. Nowadays, it’s extra more likely to be the left who’re squeamish about offending the supposedly downtrodden.
There are some authorized restrictions on free speech — comparable to incitement to violence or libel. However, past that, freedom of speech in a liberal society should embody the prerogative to say upsetting or offensive issues. It may be uncomfortable and even harmful to defend the correct to present offence. However the reverse response is way worse, opening the door to a society ruled by concern, conformity and stagnant concepts.
The Islamist extremist menace to free speech stays particularly harmful due to its skill to encourage radicals everywhere in the world, with specific exhortations to homicide. However generally governments have additionally resorted to undercover assassinations to stamp out dissident voices — witness the slaughter in 2018 of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.
Much less brutal, however extra insidious, maybe, has been the impact of “cancel tradition” on freedom of speech. In 2020, Rushdie himself signed the celebrated Harper’s letter, which declared that the “free expression of data and concepts, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is day by day changing into extra constrained.”
The letter’s signatories included heroes of the left, comparable to Noam Chomsky, and of the correct, comparable to JK Rowling, each of whom have confronted demise threats. In a liberal society, one precept that each one political camps should unite to defend is free speech. That’s true when difficult those that search to silence others. However demise threats and assassinations that goal to punish free expression are in an abhorrent class of their very own.
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