Tag Archive for: Salman Rushdie

Media Tries to Report on Salman Rushdie Stabbing Without Mentioning ‘Islam’

Author Salman Rushdie, who was forced to spend a chunk of his life in hiding because his book, The Satanic Verses, offended Islamic religious authorities in Iran who imposed a murder fatwa on him, was stabbed in the neck and had to be airlifted to a hospital when he was attacked on stage.

 Author Salman Rushdie, being stabbed at an event in New York State on Friday, suffered “10 to 15” blows in the attack, eyewitnesses said. One of them said she thought it was “a stunt” at first.

“This guy ran on to platform and started pounding on Mr Rushdie,” said Rabbi Charles Savenor, who was in the audience for the lecture at Chautauqua Institution, about 100 km from the city.

A reporter from AP said the attacker “punched or stabbed Mr Rushdie 10 to 15 times”.

“At first you’re like, ‘What’s going on?’ And then it became abundantly clear in a few seconds that he was being beaten,” Mr Savenor told the news agency. He said the attack lasted about 20 seconds.

The media, at least in this country, has wrapped itself in knots to avoid using the “I” word.

Back when Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses, it was controversial. Today, any kind of criticism of Mohammed is considered hate speech and censored to such a degree that the media would not even report what an Indian elected official said about Mohammed’s pedophilic tendencies, only to denounce it as hurtful and hateful to Muslims.

Today, a new author could never publish something like that. And the media is uncomfortable even discussing what it is that Rushdie wrote.

The various condemnations likewise don’t mention Islam, Islamic terrorism or any beyond generic concepts like “freedom of expression.”

Long before this attack, the sharia censorship that Iran wanted to impose on Americans had already been achieved.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Salman Rushdie: World Learned ‘Wrong Lessons’ from His Iran Fatwa

peace with iran tshirts

‘Fear disguised as respect’

“The writer said that the controversy that surrounded the PEN prize to Charlie Hebdo this year convinced him that, if the attacks against ‘The Satanic Verses’ had occurred today, ‘these people would not come to my defence and would use the same arguments against me by accusing me of insulting an ethnic and cultural minority.’” Indeed so. That was what happened after our free speech event in Garland, Texas: the international media, including many “conservatives” such as Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham, excoriated Pamela Geller and declared that she should have shown more “respect” — which really meant that she should have submitted in fear, as they were doing.

The freedom of speech is seriously imperiled, and most Americans have bought into the idea that “hate speech,” which they assume to be an entity that can be objectively established, does not deserve protection. They have no idea that they’re thereby paving the way for authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

“Salman Rushdie says the world learned the ‘wrong lessons’ from his Iran fatwa ordeal,” Agence France-Presse, July 22, 2015:

More than a quarter century after being slapped with a fatwa from Iran [sic] calling for his murder over his book “The Satanic Verses”, Salman Rushdie says the world has learned the “wrong lessons” about freedom of expression.

The British author, in an interview published Wednesday by the French news magazine L’Express, said his ordeal by religious fanatics determined to violently avenge what they construed as blasphemy should have served as a wake-up call to the world.

Instead, after the September 11, 2001 attack on America and the massacre in Paris in January this year of cartoonists and staff at the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly, and with the ongoing rampage of the brutal Islamic State group in the Middle East, Rushdie saidsome writers and other people were too cowed to talk freely about Islam.

“It seems we learned the wrong lessons,” he said in the interview printed in French.“Instead of concluding we need to oppose these attacks on freedom of expression, we believed we should calm them through compromises and ceding.”

The “politically correct” positions voiced by some — including a few prominent authors who disagreed with Charlie Hebdo receiving a freedom of speech award at a PEN literary gala in New York in May — were motivated by fear, Rushdie said.

– ‘Fear disguised as respect’ –

“If people weren’t being killed right now, if bombs and Kalashnikovs weren’t speaking today, the debate would be very different. Fear is being disguised as respect,” he said….

The writer said that the controversy that surrounded the PEN prize to Charlie Hebdo this year convinced him that, if the attacks against “The Satanic Verses” had occurred today, “these people would not come to my defence and would use the same arguments against me by accusing me of insulting an ethnic and cultural minority”….

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