T A B L E+T A L K Another fatal schoolyard shooting, brought to you by the gun lobby. Join the discussion about the Kentucky school shooting in Headlines. D A I L Y+Q U O T E Harrison Ford: Oof! Right in the kisser R E C E N T L Y The great Arlington National Cemetery smear By Jonathan Broder When it comes to screwing Bill Clinton, nothing is sacred, not even the dead (12/03/97) A tale of two families By Earl Ofari Hutchinson Why is a white "miracle birth" a major news story and a black "miracle birth" a non-event? (12/02/97) America's Asian "Berlin Wall" has crumbled By Jonathan Broder Thanks to American Cold War politics, Asia has been fed a steady diet of undemocratic regimes and corrupt leaders (12/01/97) All in la familia By Barbara Renoud-Gonzales Drugs -- dealing, using, addiction -- are rampant in America's Latino families (11/26/97) Been there, Dunne that By Karen Grigsby Bates Dominick Dunne's gossipy, glittery O.J. "novel" only tells half the story (11/25/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		The ayatollah who came in from the cold JOHN LE CARRÉ'S OUTRAGEOUS ATTACK ON SALMAN RUSHDIE KEEPS THE FLAMES OF CENSORSHIP BURNING - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Among the strongest impulses of the intellectual class must be the itch for the "unpredictable"; the desire to say something different or unusual. When the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie and "those responsible for the publication" of "The Satanic Verses" on Valentine's Day, 1989, he made the most frontal possible challenge to free expression. A large bounty, offered in public, for the solicitation of murder, by the theocratic leader of a nation, against an author in another country, for the offense of composing a work of fiction. This had no historic precedent. Most writers rallied to the side of Rushdie and his publishers. But a number of them decided that it would be boring to say all the obvious things. Instead, they criticized Rushdie for offending against the tenets and emotions of a great religion. They implied that criticism of Islam was a Western, elitist, colonialist practice. They accused him of caring more for royalties than for human life and of insisting on a paperback edition rather than acting to calm the passions aroused by the hardback. And they said, darkly, that "he must have known what he was doing." These were the positions of British writers Roald Dahl, John Berger, Paul Johnson, Hugh Trevor-Roper and John le Carré, among others. At the time, Rushdie was rather busy finding a place to stay, and didn't get around to replying to each in turn. But nor did he forget, as a recent rancorous correspondence in the Guardian of London has demonstrated. Le Carré, angered by the suggestion in the New York Times Book Review that the central character in his latest thriller, "The Tailor of Panama," was an anti-Semitic "Judas" caricature, had made a speech to a Jewish organization in his own defense and given it to the Guardian to reprint. In it, he bemoaned the tendency of some Jews to equate all criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, and denounced said tendency as a form of "correctspeak." A day or so later came a letter from Salman Rushdie saying, in effect, that now that le Carré knew what it was like to face a mild form of religious correctness, would he care to change his mind about the real thing? Le Carré, it turned out, did not care. He repeated all the charges listed above, including the one about the pro-Rushdie forces evincing "colonial" attitudes. He added that he had been motivated in his call for a moratorium on the paperback of "The Satanic Verses" by concern for the "mailroom girls" who might get their hands blown off. This solicitude, he loftily implied, was more elevated than any concern for Rushdie's earnings. (Contempt for mere royalties is new for le Carré but then, so is the idea that the author of "Midnight's Children" and "The Jaguar's Smile" is an apologist for Western-style colonialism.) At this point, I should declare, I myself wrote a letter to the Guardian inquiring whether le Carré would have been satisfied by a free edition of the book, given out from trestles in the street. As for the "girls" in the mailroom, none had been harmed in eight years' worth of defiance of the fatwa. Instead, rather inspiringly, the staffs of Crown Books and B. Dalton had rebelled against their respective managements' proposal to drop the book as a security risk. This rather dented le Carré's suggestion that Rushdie's defenders were all members of the elite. To compare their brave conduct to blasphemy was, I suggested, like relieving yourself in your hat and then stuffing the hat on your head. (I now slightly regret the last bit, because it gave later correspondents the opportunity to change the subject.) N E X T+P A G E+| No right to offend the religious