Douglas Murray has written two pieces about yesterday’s attack on Salmon Rushdie, one for the Telegraph, another for the Spectator.
In the Telegraph, he urges the British Government not to equivocate in its support for the novelist – no ‘On the one hand…’ type of response in which condemnation of the attack is quickly followed by an acknowledgment that some Muslims find The Satanic Verses deeply offensive.
The attack in New York on Salman Rushdie has brought back sharply into focus the fact that the Booker-winning novelist has been a target for Islamists for over three decades, ever since the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses in 1988. After that novel’s publication the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against Rushdie. Encouraged by British Muslims, the Iranian leader accused Rushdie of blasphemy and put a bounty on his head. For many years Rushdie lived in hiding, protected by the British state.
Rushdie described those bewildering, terrifying, heroic years living in hiding in his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton. It is quite a work, detailing every demoralising corner of the affair. It includes accounts of the politicians of both left and right who failed to support the novelist, as well as the writers, artists and other public figures who pretended that the Ayatollah had committed an offence, but so had the author of the novel. And of course the crowds of Muslims in Bradford and other cities who burned copies of the book and were allowed to call for Rushdie´s murder on British streets and television.
He concludes:
Let us not have a repetition of the caviling, caveating and cowardice we saw from some quarters in 1989. No ifs. No buts. No “on the one hand, on the other”. A British author has been attacked. This time, let his country be fully behind him.
In the Spectator, he’s more emollient, praising the efforts of Susan Sontag and others who stood by the beleaguered author:
In his 2012 memoir – Joseph Anton – Rushdie wrote about the fatwa years. The book is a detailed chronicle of all the people who let him down: the MPs who promised support and then whipped up mobs; the political figures of left and right who said that while the Ayatollah may have caused an offence so had the novelist; the authorities who allowed Muslims in Bradford and others on television to call for a British subject’s murder with impunity.
But it is also a chronicle of the people who supported him, the friends who stood by him and the public figures who stood up for him. One of them was the American writer Susan Sontag, who helped organise a public reading of Rushdie’s work in New York. As Sontag said, the moment called for some basic ‘civic courage’. It is striking how much of that civic courage has evaporated in recent years. Today no one would be able to write – much less get published – a novel like The Satanic Verses. Perhaps nobody has tried. From novels to cartoons a de facto Islamic blasphemy law settled across the West in the wake of the Rushdie affair. The attack today will doubtless exacerbate that.
Worth reading in full.
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So the jabbed/zealot/manic/covindians Covid-19 crew have suddenly gone silent?
Let me guess!
I was wrong, Holy God! How could that be possible??????
say it a little louder honey!
I can’t here you!
I got me a crysler it’s as big as a whale, and it’s about to lie through it’s teeth (baleen) again!
I’m full of anticiparatty! …go figure
“Teachers’ strike not about pay but controlling ‘brutally racist state’, union leader says”
Where is this..?
“The New Pause lengthens to eight years nine months”
The writer of this excellent article concludes by saying;
”I have set out these new calculations in some detail because once it is more widely known it will help to bring the climate nonsense to an end.”
Well now, there’s optimistic for you! I wish that logic and rationality was a factor in this climate business but I am afraid it has gone way beyond that and seems to have become a religious cult driven with all the ferocity of the Spanish Inquisition.
Sounds like more Government propaganda masquerading as news.
In the comments section of https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/how-many-deaths-were-caused-by-the/comments , this one caught my eye:
Dan Shaw – Liked by Norman Fenton
The Yellow Card system is a passive monitoring system by government choice. On behalf of the government, the Royal College of GPs Research and Surveillance Centre at Oxford University runs active monitoring of respiratory viruses, such as influenza and SARA CoV 2. Active monitoring of all vaccines would expose the dirty secret of modern medicine that vaccines are not the ‘safe and effective’ miracle popular myth holds them to be. So long as doctors, bureaucrats and other well-meaning health practitioners believe vaccines are a miracle, they will go knees to chest to suppress anything ‘anti-vax’ in the false belief they are doing good.
Peter Murrell, husband of Nicola Sturgeon, reportedly arrested over SNP finance probe
https://f7td5.app.goo.gl/AFLhPv
Sent via @updayUK
Aye, aye. Smells a bit fishy.
Saw it on GBN around midday; top item on the news, with police Scotland taking an interest in offices in both Edinburgh & Glasgow. M’s £600K donation being spent on the odd campaign etc, by the sound of it.
“Say ‘pregnant people’, NHS watchdog tells staff in gender neutral drive”
I’ll say ‘pregnant person’ the day they show me a bona fide XY ‘person’ with all his physical accoutrements – including dangly bits and testosterone levels – who who has become naturally pregnant.
Anyone else bothered by this? NHS to give our medical health data – you know, that thing we signed petitions about and instructed our GPs to withhold only a couple of years ago – to Palantir, that entirely corrupt ‘big data’ company. Were we informed? Do we get a choice any more? Clearly not. (It’s from Open Democracy so there might be a bit of nose-holding to read it.)
“In November, lawyers working for Foxglove wrote to NHS England on behalf of the National Pensioners’ Convention, Just Treatment and the Doctors Association UK, to raise concerns about the sharing of pseudonymised data.
The lawyers questioned whether consent requirements – which are needed to process pseudonymised data – had been violated, and what safeguards, if any, had been put in place to protect patient privacy.
NHS England has still not sent a substantive reply after more than three month’s but has now instructed all trusts to implement Faster Data Flows.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/palantir-peter-thiel-nhs-england-foundry-faster-data-flows/
Following a story on GBN the other day, those who operate an iPhone might like to adjust their settings before April 23rd, to avoid the Gov’s trial “emergency” alarm game, allegedly to be tried on that day. In Settings/Notifications/EMERGENCY ALERTS, both Extreme Alerts and Severe Alerts, can be switched off. Mine have been.
Those who use Android ‘phones might wish to do likewise. It is really just a test of compliance.