When Salman Rushdie was stabbed at a reader event in New York state, the violence was, paradoxically, made even more shocking by the length of time it had taken to eventuate. The attack came 33 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa against Rushdie, calling on Muslims across the world to kill him., which satirised Islam in general and an Ayatollah-like figure in particular.
The time lag between fatwa and attack is remarkable . But even more remarkable is that since 1989, death threats, once the province of ayatollahs and terrorists, have become commonplace.Several of my colleagues athave received death threats . If you’re a woman, a person of colour, trans or disabled, you will be far more likely to have received one. Politicians get them all the time.It is a profound social shift and a deeply alarming one.
Death threats, and their carriage on social media, are one of the sharpest points of the debate over cancel culture, which is so fraught that it’s even become a matter of political alignment as to whether one puts the term cancel culture in “scare quotes”.And the attack on Rushdie has reopened arguments about cancel culture and freedom of speech, especially because we know what side Rushdie comes down on.
People often elide artistic freedom with free speech as a political and public good, and the two issues merge into each other to a confusing extent. We saw this in the reaction to the shockingattack of 2015, when the offices of the French satirical newspaper were stormed by Muslim terrorists. They killed 12 people and injured 11 others.
Have you even been on twitter if you haven’t had a death threat, bro
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