Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa against the author Salman Rushdie in 1989 made clear that the greatest threat to artists, intellectuals and journalists in the modern era comes from authoritarian states. In recent years, the latter have increasingly outsourced violence to murky non-state actors. This grim trend has been underscored by assassinations of dissenting writers in Russia, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and many other countries.
Yet many in the West have been quick to turn the attack on Rushdie by a Hezbollah groupie from New Jersey into “fodder for highly politicized polemics,” as The New York Times put it. The unspeakable violence against Rushdie has become another “flash point in the roiling 21st-century debate over free speech, liberal values and ‘cancel culture.’”
Thus, the Financial Times editorializes that free speech “needs to be defended with even more vehemence in the aftermath of the attack on Rushdie.” Moreover, “freedom of speech in a liberal society must include the prerogative to say upsetting or offensive things.”
