Salman Rushdie's Stabbing Shows the Danger of Conflating Words With 'Violence'

[Behind the Aegis]

Author Salman Rushdie was brutally stabbed on Friday prior to a lecture in New York state in front of a crowd of horrified onlookers.

The motive for the attack is, thus far, unclear, but given that Rushdie spent nine years in hiding after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa authorizing his murder over his authorship of the novel, The Satanic Verses—which the Ayatollah considered blasphemous—and that Rushdie was attacked just as he was about to give a speech, an effort to silence Rushdie permanently through violence seems likely.

The message sent by a successful attack on Rushdie is loud and unmistakable: your hurtful speech is the equivalent of violence against me and my values, and you deserve violence in return. It’s a message intended not just for Rushdie, but for anyone who might be tempted to follow in his footsteps.

When we began our careers in free speech advocacy in the early 2000s, the conflation of the expression of opinion with physical violence was a fringe belief, at least in the United States. Yet over the last 10 years, we have seen that argument become far more common, first on college campuses, and then in our society at large.

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[nycbos]

1. Damn right

This will make many on the left uncomfortable because they are afraid of being called Islamaphobic but there is something about Islam that doesn't exist in other religions. The Iranian Ayatollah called for Rushdie to be murdered. In the UK British Muslims literally took to the street to call for Rushdie's death. This was in 1989. They still haven't gotten over a book that he wrote more than 30 years ago.

Every country where they execute gay people is a Muslim majority country. Every country where women get executed for adultery is a Muslim majority country.

It is not colonialist, imperialistic, or whatever other leftist buzz word you want to use to say western liberal society are superior to places like that. And I think most American Muslims would agree. I presume that many of them came here because they wanted to live in a place that offered more freedom than their country of origin.