Honestly: We Ignored Salman Rushdie’s Warning
Salman Rushdie,1980 (Micheline PELLETIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
We live in a culture in which many people believe that words are violence. In this, they have much in common with Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who issued the first fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, and with Hadi Matar, the 24-year-old who stabbed the novelist in the neck on a stage in Western New York.
Today, as Rushdie recovers from his injuries, reflections from Bari on the profound impact that the words are violence crowd has had on our culture.
Yes yes yes, Bari. Your new child will read this one day and feel chills like I did.
Fundamentalist religion and its inherent intolerance is an old civilizational fight but we now find ourselves in an era where the supposed torch bearers of tolerance have turned on us. The illiberal left is here to destroy free speech and any offending expression (as judged by the offended) to the point that they’re revealing their oneness with religious extremists by actually defending this type of madness! It’s called adhering to and perpetuating the theory that words are violence. This barbarism is a direct result of that notion, just as much as it is of religious intolerance!