Writes Matthew Syed, in "The ayatollahs have found their accomplices in western liberals/We blame the Rushdie attack on Muslim fanatics, but we shouldn’t ignore our own complicity" (London Times).
August 14, 2022
"Many of the comments on the Rushdie affair over the past 24 hours have pointed out that for many years he has been living quite freely..."
"... that the fatwa had been revoked by Iran (although the bounty remains) and that society has moved on from the dark days of book-burning, even if lone attackers remain a threat.
I would suggest that this is delusional, a fantasy conjured up by western liberals to distract from a more sinister truth: over 30 years they have worked as the de facto accomplices of the ayatollah, assisting in the task of dismantling free speech, sending fear through those who dare to criticise or ridicule religion or anything else. Rushdie, in this sense, is not — and never was — a historical affair but a live scandal running through the veins of British life, not to mention other western societies.... For initially noble motives related to the fear of giving offence to minority groups, we have committed the most grievous offence on our way of life. 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' was the view attributed to Voltaire by his most famous biographer. We must resurrect its spirit, reclaim its beauty. For today, with Rushdie hooked up to a ventilator, we continue to sleepwalk towards disaster."
Writes Matthew Syed, in "The ayatollahs have found their accomplices in western liberals/We blame the Rushdie attack on Muslim fanatics, but we shouldn’t ignore our own complicity" (London Times).
Writes Matthew Syed, in "The ayatollahs have found their accomplices in western liberals/We blame the Rushdie attack on Muslim fanatics, but we shouldn’t ignore our own complicity" (London Times).
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33 comments:
In a sensible world, Iran's glorification of the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, would be a disqualifier for the proposed nuclear talks. How can you in good faith deal with a country that celebrated the stabbing of Salman Rushdie because he wrote a book?
"...we continue to sleepwalk towards disaster."
Cultural suicide, not disaster. The West needs to shame and exile those in its midst who bend a knee to less enlightened cultures as atonement for their ancestors having had the audacity to develop and bequeath to their progeny a superior society.
They broke it, they bought it.
Teaching the real story of the Crusades would be a start.
Plus refusing entrance as refugees or immigrants those who come from gender and religious apartheid states.
Rushdie should consider sending his prior security guards apology notes now. That elitist twat treated them like garbage for years.
He’s certainly right to draw a connection between Western political correctness and the fatwa and eventual attempted murder of Rushdie. But Western liberals are not accomplices, they are birds of a feather. They deserve no blame for this specific attack, only for their choice to be spiritual brothers of the attacker.
Frank Costello:
When I was your age, they would say we could become Muslim extremists or progressive liberals.
Today what I'm saying to you is this: When you're facing a fatwa...
...what's the difference?
I had never read "The Satanic Verses." This hate-crime spurred me to order a from Amazon (in paperback so that it can't be confiscated from me when Amazon decides that the book must be memory-holed because it has been deemed insensitive to a preferred group.)
The State Department people have never bought a used car or tried to collect money from a deadbeat. Iran lies about everything.
We must resurrect its spirit
Totally agree with the spirit of this piece, but look at what Syed says, "sending fear through those who dare to criticise or ridicule religion"
This not true. Western liberals have been working to send fear through those who dare to criticize or ridicule Islam. They have been engaging in and strongly encouraging criticism and ridicule of Christianity and Christians.
Both Syed and Rushdie himself substituted the word religion for Islam out of fear of being labeled racist, xenophobic or Islamophobic.
Lumping Christians together with radical Islamists is like lumping Starbucks coffee lovers with meth addicts. Both may be hooked on a chemical, but you have to judge them by the outcomes.
Think about it. Hillary issued a political fatwa on Trump the day she lost the election. Ever since then, the Deep State, Dem party and Fake News have tried to carry it out.
what was Rushdie own take on Twitter bans etc?
"We blame the Rushdie attack on Muslim fanatics, but we shouldn’t ignore our own complicity"
"And by "our own", we mean your own, bigot."
Weren’t we just burning books of authors deemed not woke enough? Burning books and tearing down statues followed by burning neighborhoods.
I think Bari Weiss had much of the same insight in her most recent column. We ignored Salman Rushdie's warning.
I completely agree with this. We- not all of us, but those in charge of our speech, our education institutions, and our media- have become full-on enablers of those things that eat away at our own civil society. Those who preach 'diversity, inclusion, equity' and maintain that homeless have a right to shoot up and shit in your kids school grounds, and that the borders should remain open and the same people who approved of our nation's cities being ripped apart- not to recover soon- by BLM riots. They have destroyed our eduction system, our media, and our political system. They are like a cancer on the body of civil society. We can continue to watch it metastasize or we can do something about it.
Rushdie has spent years telling the West what is real and what is happening. We smile, attend nice Chautauqua conferences, have a cocktail or latte together, then continue to support the cancerous thinking that enabled what they saw onstage the other day.
we saw the early reaction with lecarre, who deemed this pythonesque romp, too triggering, then he went totally off the board after 9/11, Rushdie was disdainful of secular indian and the the threat from increasingly deobandi pakistan, that ft leavenworth candidate general zia spread,
after the 77 coup,
those that gave credit to khomeini like foucault and bulliet, seemed to ignore that theocracy was the point of the exercise, have they learned anything, of course not, they would respect prince salman's modernizing campaign
Islam never dies. Death is always on the mind of its votaries.
good for him
and the fatwa has not been revoked, that is not at all true.
the government "revoked" the fatwa
the religious leaders in Iran have not revoked the fatwa
that's a secular idea, that governments are the most important thing
not true to religious people
the religious leaders in Iran who issued the fatwa are responsible for ordering a murder
you can say it's similar to our government officials who have ordered hits on Islamic assassins.
one major difference (obviously) is that assassins are killed for being assassins. While writers are killed for being writers.
Islam should not be let off easily for this attempted killing
they called for it
And Islamic leaders who are opposed to the killing should speak out against it. And if they are not willing to do that, then we all know what Islam stands for.
Death for blasphemy. Murder for words. Murder for speaking. Murder because you have a bad soul and I am God's agent sent her to murder you.
Satanic.
I might have to read The Satanic Verses.
Is Satan in the book? Anybody read it?
"that for many years he has been living quite freely..."
Yes and no. I have heard Rushdie speak. My sense was that he had no illusions about his "freedom" but that he had decided to live openly and honestly.
"over 30 years they have worked as the de facto accomplices of the ayatollah, assisting in the task of dismantling free speech, sending fear through those who dare to criticise or ridicule religion or anything else."
Well, progs are fine with deriding Christianity, of course, but not Islam. But progs never disliked the fatwah as such, and indeed have been happy to dismantle free speech--it was good when it served their goals earlier in the 20th century, but now not so much. Rushdie's life and words affronted them.
"we shouldn’t ignore our own complicity"
But of course the complicity will be ignored. Which prog will even recognize it as such? But I will make one partial excuse: over the years, a number of traditional liberals have supported Rushdie, even while coddling Islam and islamists.
While spouting the usual proggy nonsense already covered in another thread, Rushdie has also been quite forthright in defending free speech. He really was mugged by reality. What will he say now that he has been stabbed by it?
"For 33 years, Salman Rushdie has embodied freedom and the fight against obscurantism." - Emmanuel Macron on Twitter, bravely leading the charge against...um...you know, those one guys.
Nobody read The Satanic Verses. But by all means buy it to make a point.
The first fatwa, I believe, was directed at anyone who even read the book. So carry it prominently everywhere you go.
I don't even understand the point about our complicity. Rushdie himself terminated his security, over objections.
And now a Fatwa is threatened by an apparent Muslim against J.K. Rowling. How will the LGBTQetc. leaders respond to that? Strange bedfellows -- presuming I can say fellow.
The left in this country are perfectly at home with the Iranian fascists...they can only dream of having that much power and control...
'Plus refusing entrance as refugees or immigrants those who come from gender and religious apartheid states.'
Freedom of religion is one thing, but Sharia goes against every aspect of (classic) liberal, Western democracy.
Any religion espousing anything like Sharia law should be explicitly banned.
It pissed me off to see Muslim women in Costco covered up head to toe while their husbands stroll around in flip-flops, shorts and golf shirts.
There's no question that we've been moving away from free speech in recent years. Perhaps because society is more diverse and divided than it once was and social constraints don't inhibit people the way they once did.
But haven't we gotten tired of people using every act of violence as a political cudgel to attack people who aren't directly responsible for it or advocating it or defending it? There may be a valid argument behind Syed's article, but it comes at the wrong time.
The western left is in Full Alliance with islamic supremacists as they share the same goals: the destruction of western civilization.
The western lefties believe once they've bounced the rubble of western cuv that they can persuade their islamic supremacist allies to work with them to rebuild society from the ground up.
The islamic supremacists just smile, nod their heads for now, and continue to sharpen their blades....
Tina Trent: "And now a Fatwa is threatened by an apparent Muslim against J.K. Rowling. How will the LGBTQetc. leaders respond to that? Strange bedfellows -- presuming I can say fellow."
Not strange at all.
They've been pals for decades.
Blogger Dave Begley said...
The State Department people have never bought a used car or tried to collect money from a deadbeat. Iran lies about everything.
Take a look at them ! They all look like grad students in Medieval Literature. It would probably take four of them to add up to a normal testosterone level.
I honestly forgot about how extensive the danger was from this fatwa. The Weiss article linked above by Temujin has this paragraph:
"In July 1991, the Japanese translator of the condemned book, Hitoshi Igarashi, 44-years-old, was stabbed to death outside his office at the University of Tsukuba, northeast of Tokyo. The same month, the book’s Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was also stabbed—this time, in his own home in Milan. Two years later, in July 1993, the book’s Turkish translator, the prolific author Aziz Nesin, was the target of an arson attack on a hotel in the city of Sivas. He escaped, but 37 others were killed. A few months later, Islamists came for William Nygaard, the book’s Norwegian publisher. Nygaard was shot three times outside his home in Oslo and was critically injured."
Nothing to add. But I agree that the West has lost it's ability to confront such an evil.
Let's not forget that he's an atheist pompous lefty jerk!
A pompous lefty atheist jerk whose case is proof that even atheist lefty pompous jerk writers
are better and more valuable people than Allah's slaves are.
A philosophy of divergence. That said, subversion from within is insidious. #PrinciplesMatter
Let's not forget that he's an atheist pompous lefty jerk!
While not atheist per se, secular regimes with ethical religions led by mortal gods, goddesses, and experts, are, historically, second only to Muslim regimes in their total preponderance of violations, violence, and obstinate progress.
A pompous lefty atheist jerk
Indeed. In what totality of authority do you have faith? Some in God, others in gods/goddesses, and many in experts of color.
I would like those who say "words are violence" tell me how stabbing is different.
"In what totality of authority do you have faith?"
I don't understand the question. The only totality I know of is my own and to some extent others' experiences.
Islam stinks inherently; secularism can go bad but overall the results look good to me.
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