The shameful truth – terrorism works

This is a bleak version of looking on the bright side, but what’s astonishing about last week’s vicious stabbing in upstate New York is that such an attack didn’t occur decades ago. However sickeningly incapacitated at present, Salman Rushdie himself would doubtless agree. Having survived unharmed for 33 years under a death sentence – endorsed by a depressingly hefty proportion of Muslims – was no mean feat. Yet that’s too long to maintain nonstop vigilance. Little wonder that Rushdie and his minders let down their guards.

Coming unnervingly close to fulfilling its lethal intent, the frenzied assault at one of the world’s most painfully harmless gatherings (and I should know) – the literary festival – is wretched news not only for the esteemed novelist, his family, friends and readers, but for all writers and our audiences. Because, if experience serves, the response to this attempted murder is apt to materialise in two layers, like a gleaming vanilla icing slathered on a mud pie.

We’ve already seen the vanilla bit: fellow fiction writers such as Hanif Kureishi and J.K. Rowling (whose own life was threatened for expressing her solidarity) decrying the violence against one of our own and underscoring the importance of the right to free speech. Countless columnists have followed suit. However laudable, these exhortations fall sneakily flat. When couched in generalities, defences of free speech tend to come across as dreary and obvious (again, I should know). Only in the particular do these discussions get interesting.

We saw a similar uproar after the Islamist murders of Charlie Hebdo journalists in Paris in 2015, and not merely from the great and the good: huge candle-carrying crowds rallied around the slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’. So the form is that we all agree we mustn’t allow these dreadful people to cramp our style, declaiming that in western democracies it’s the fanatics who have to get with our programme, not the other way around. In the face of efforts to impose sectarian blasphemy prohibitions on multi-faith western publics, the superficial lesson runs that free speech is our sacred value, which we’ll not allow to be trammelled any more than Pakistan allows the desecration of the Koran. In short: ‘You nut jobs can’t push us around.’ We’re nourished by our indignation and fortified by our rare unity of purpose.

Then there’s the mud pie. Our we-shall-not-be-moved resolve is a self-flattering delusion. In truth, the nut jobs do push us around and have been doing so for years. The Anglosphere’s cowed acquiescence to Islamist bullies was vividly on display during the 2005 Danish cartoons hoo-ha. While numerous Continental newspapers defiantly republished those satirical depictions of Mohammed to demonstrate that they couldn’t be intimidated, mainstream print media in the UK, the US and Canada refused to – thereby crippling articles about an essentially pictorial story.

Tact or fear? British newspapers especially have no reputation for tact, so let’s go for fear. These folks frighten the bejesus out of us, and we’ll do just about anything to keep from upsetting them. Terrorism works. Thus the mud-pie lesson most of my literary colleagues will derive from Rushdie’s hideous mutilation is: ‘Avoid writing about Islam at all costs, and never step on Muslim toes.’ Multiple writers and editors have already observed that The Satanic Verses (1988) would never be published today. Rushdie himself might think better of writing it now. Contemporary publishing imposes a de facto fatwa on criticism of Islam.

Besides, absent jihadists, we push one another around. The UK abandoned the principle of free expression the moment it brought in laws against ‘hate speech’, which in legal terms lies entirely in the eye of the beholder. Unsurprisingly, hate-speech laws have continued to expand, vigorously enforced by constabularies who find persecuting Twitter perps more rewardingly trendy, and less dangerous, than arresting armed burglars. Britain has formally elevated the non-right to not be offended over the real right to say what you like. The ominously broad ban may or may not make it into the final Online Safety Bill, but for a prohibition against ‘legal but harmful’ content to have made it into any version speaks volumes. Even ‘causing anxiety’ in Britain is a criminal act.

As many Muslims claim the book hurts their feelings, legally The Satanic Verses is hate speech. It’s a small step from there to the conclusion that last week Rushdie got what he had coming.

I had a revealing exchange at another painfully harmless literary festival last year when once more discussing the – to me – cut-and-dried question of whether white writers should feel free to craft non-white characters (yes; next). An audience member asked: ‘Isn’t it really a question of respect?’ I said certainly not. I said I was under no obligation to ‘respect’ my own characters, whom I often subject to derision. Good lord, I can gleefully kill my characters, and smite them with all manner of humiliations beforehand.

This ‘respect’ business is the nugget. We no longer understand the word. Real respect is never owed but earned, and once upon a time we doled it out to those we deemed worthy of our regard and withheld it from the undeserving. Obsessed with sanctified ‘identities’, we’re now required to respect everyone, even make-believe characters – so we can hardly blame Muslims for demanding ‘respect’ for their prophet, whom non-Muslims and lapsed Muslims such as Rushdie don’t necessarily revere. By extension, if the Church of the Garden of Eden declares that eating apples offends their faith, we’ve all to forego Bramley tarts.

The most effective reply to Rushdie’s maiming would surely be axing the Online Safety Bill and repealing every single hate-speech statute. (Fat chance.) Otherwise, maybe a public campaign to buy The Satanic Verses until the novel hits number one on Amazon. A more whimsical riposte? Worldwide on the same day, every mainstream western publication runs a headline asserting that a certain someone ‘has a poopy face’. There’s safety in numbers, and the crazies are spread too thin to go for all of us.