Quick take: The attack on Salman Rushdie

 If someone doesn't want you to read a book, read that book.  If the author gets death threats for writing a book, read that book.  In the case of The Satanic Verses, it actually is an amazing novel.  Last semester, I taught a class on banned books, which had a bunch of heterodox nonfiction, and Salman Rushdie's modern classic.

I asked the students to guess what was so "offensive" that the Ayatollah declared a fatwa.  Nobody ever gets it, but the novel begins with the two main characters falling from a plane that just blew up, having been blown up mid-air by islamic terrorists.  It is actually a bit jarring for younger, modern audiences who are unaccustomed to seeing that in fiction.  Why?  "Islamophobia!"  It is actually quite rare, now, to see any portrayal of islamic terrorism in fiction, regardless of media.  Yet that was not what bothered the Ayatollah, who supported terrorism.  Rather, there were some weird things that happened in dream sequences that were actually quite funny, but Kimmy really wasn't known for his sense of humor.

Yet notice something.  A modern, younger audience sees the intro sequence and gets an "islamophobia" vibe, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the fatwa which leads to Rushdie actually getting stabbed and winding up in the hospital (or fine, "in hospital") just a few months later.

Douglas Murray has a term.  Western anti-Westernism, as distinguished from the anti-Westernism which one finds outside the West.  The thing that surprised the students in The Satanic Verses had nothing whatsoever to do with the fatwa itself.  Moreover, the act of violence-- real violence, as opposed to that "words are violence" bullshit-- which we just saw demonstrates Rushdie's view and the hypocrisy of censoriousness Western anti-Westernism.