Salman Rushdie: Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
By Salman Rushdie
(Random House, 224 pages, $28)
Two summers ago, Salman Rushdie was stabbed by an Islamist radical while giving a talk at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. The attack left him blind in one eye and his body and face nearly ruined. His memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, released last week, purports to give an account of the attack and his long recovery from it, though the book largely fails to make good on its seemingly electrifying premise. I had high hopes for the book, in light of the events that led up to it, and because Rushdie’s prior foray into nonfiction, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012), his memoir of the fatwa years, is a masterpiece. Covering a quarter-century and told in the third person, Rushdie is sympathetic as the world’s most hunted man, and the pages fly by.
Knife doesn’t quite cut it. In fact, Knife seems more like a medical report than a memoir about a terror attack. Too many random daydreams, too little action. Too much Rushdie, not enough radical Islam. Rushdie’s refusal to go and meet, or even speak with, his attacker, who is currently locked up in a New York prison and awaiting trial, didn’t help the story at all. Instead, Rushdie relies on an imagined dialogue between himself and his would-be assassin, which goes on for 30 pages and is rather unconvincing. Readers don’t want fiction in nonfiction, and for good reason. They — we — like to think the events in any book we read, even a novel, are true. Without an active antagonist, in this case an Islam-crazed nutcase, as a principal character, the narrative was robbed of all suspense, preventing Knife from having the tautness and depth of, say, an In Cold Blood or even a Joseph Anton.
In fact, radical Islam figures almost not at all into the story, and is treated more or less as a topic Rushdie would rather avoid. The villains of Knife are Trump and conservatives, or “Trumpublicans” as Rushdie refers to them, and much of the book is devoted to their savaging. He attacks Ron DeSantis’ “bigoted revisionism,” and conservatives’ “fantasies of an idealized past (when exactly was America ‘great’ in the way those red hats wanted to re-create?).” He weighs in on Brexit, climate, the Right’s post-Roe “assault on women,” “the weaponizing of Christianity in the United States,” and the supposed right-wing war on books, libraries and authors. Curiously, there’s no criticism of China, or any of the book-banning, book-hating juntas of the Dar Islam, many of which have banned all Rushdie books and even called for his death. It’s the West he’s mad at now. He also doesn’t mention that great eraser, cancel culture, a product of the Left, which has snuffed out many public figures, including writers. Yet Rushdie knows very well the threat the intolerant New Left pose to free speech and expression. As he told Anderson Cooper two weeks ago:
The attack is coming from so many different directions. It used to be the case that very conservative voices were the places from which you would hear that such and such a book should be banned or is obscene… [What’s] different now is that it’s also coming from progressive voices. There are progressives saying that certain kinds of speech should not be permitted because it offends against this or that vulnerable group.
So he knows the threat that the wokesters pose to free speech, yet he still continues to cast lots with them and eviscerate conservatives at every opportunity? Reminds one of what Ann Coulter said years ago: “If Democrats had any brains, they’d be Republicans.” It’s conservatives, not liberals who are trying to preserve our First Amendment freedoms. But it’s not clear that Rushdie even believes in the First Amendment, or freedom, anymore. From Knife:
I was in no state to talk about freedom. It was a word that had become a minefield. Ever since conservatives started laying claim to it (Freedom Tower, freedom fries), liberals and progressives had started backing away from it toward new definitions of the social good according to which people would no longer be entitled to dispute the new norms. Protecting the rights and sensibilities of groups perceived as vulnerable would take precedence over freedom of speech, which the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti had called “the tongue set free.” This move away from First Amendment principles allowed that venerable piece of the Constitution to be co-opted by the right. The First Amendment was now what allowed conservatives to lie, to abuse, to denigrate. It became a kind of freedom for bigotry. The right had a new social agenda too, one that sounded a lot like an old one: authoritarianism, backed up by unscrupulous media, big money, complicit politicians, and corrupt judges.
“The tongue set free, huh?” Unless … one says something wrong, or simply the wrong way, in which case the tongue will be permanently set free, with a sharp object. But Salman Rushdie is enamored of such an idea, apparently thinking himself too evolved, too cool, for the plebeian First Amendment, which protects the rights of the unschooled and the Ivy Leaguer in equal measure. One feels that is what Rushdie, a well-known snob, has a problem with.
Then there’s this little gem, also from Knife:
America is sliding back towards the Middle Ages, as white supremacy exerts itself not only over Black bodies, but over women’s bodies too. False narratives rooted in antiquated religiosity and bigoted ideas from hundreds of years ago are used to justify this, and find willing audiences and believers… Above all we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have proved attractive to many. So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories within which people want to live.
Stories in which people want to live? From a man whose books have caused riots and gotten people murdered and blown up? He can’t be serious.
Certainly, if he thinks the U.S. is medieval, then he’ll have a hard time living anywhere on our sad planet.
“Rushdie was a bit of a Leftie,” his late friend Christopher Hitchens reports in his memoirs. I’ll say. And still is. Trump’s election, which occurred the same year Rushdie became a U.S. citizen, appears to have wounded our subject more deeply, more permanently, than his would-be assassin’s blade. I recently came across a 2017 interview Rushdie did with the Guardian in which he seems almost obsessively anti-Trump, even going as far as to say that the Charlottesville protest should not have been allowed at all, since the protesters were, in his view, there to commit violence. A startling position for a supposed free-speech advocate to take. Even the American Civil Liberties Union supported the Charlottesville marchers’ right to assemble.
Rushdie has told the BBC that if Trump wins, he will probably move back to Britain. He claimed America will be “unlivable” if Trump wins again and then compared Trump to Harvey Weinstein, Boris Johnson, and Adolf Eichmann, an odd trio for sure. He doesn’t like post-Brexit Britain either, he tells the interviewer. It seems our subject is increasingly a man without a country. Where can he go to find that perfect balance of total freedom for himself and his fellow leftists and limited freedoms for those with whom they disagree? Maybe Sweden? Canada? Scotland? The Scottish Parliament just enacted a hate speech law of the sort Rushdie seems to want, the brainchild of a young Muslim lawmaker who’s now the country’s first minister. How would the author of The Satanic Verses like living under that? Talk about medieval.
Making sense of Rushdie is not easy, but one thing we can say for sure is that he is, above all else, a careerist. This is the same guy who, in 1990, attempted to get Khomeini’s fatwa lifted by publishing an essay saying he had converted to Islam. The mullahs were not fooled. The fatwa remained. Now the careerist is at it again, saying anything to keep his paymasters in the uber-woke worlds of publishing and media happy, betting that sniping constantly at conservatives will keep him employed and perhaps prevent his own long-called-for cancellation. Maybe not such a bad strategy from a career standpoint, as the hand by whom one’s bread is buttered also holds a knife.
Moreover, I believe Rushdie feels guilty about his years as a blaspheming bad boy, as the definitional anti-Islam, anti-P.C. rebel. The entire subtext of Knife screams “I’m sorry.” Sorry, for my wild days, for my years of blaspheming Islam, for The Satanic Verses. (Did he pay back the royalties? Relinquish the rights?) Such speech was tolerated in the carefree 1980s. Blaspheming stuff was cool then. But ours is a far less tolerant time. That Salman Rushdie appears to be joining ranks with the censors is a most disheartening development.
In any case, our First Amendment is nonnegotiable. It is enshrined, on the hearts of Our People, and must be preserved in its most literal and radical form. Salman Rushdie’s right to speak, prosper, and write books that start riots shall not be infringed.
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