Free speech is under sustained attack
It is astonishing that some still claim that free speech is not under attack. A fatwa was first placed on Sir Salman Rushdie’s head in 1989, in response to the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, which was judged by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to be blasphemous. Sir Salman went into hiding; the book was banned in several countries; bookshops were bombed and people were killed.
Tehran never truly rescinded the fatwa, and progovernment Iranian newspapers have congratulated the man who attacked the author in the United States last week. This is the reality of a regime that deluded Western elites still believe we should do business with, despite its continued and unashamed commitment to assaulting the West both directly and through its proxies.
Iran’s suppression of free expression, which extends to religious and sexual minorities, is a special category of authoritarianism: brazen and violent. But when fanatics attack free speech, we have to ask how far the West is truly willing to go to defend it, especially in the context of the growth of a chilling culture of intolerance and retribution within our own societies.
In 2020, Sir Salman joined over 150 intellectuals, including JK Rowling and Martin Amis, in writing a letter warning that “the free exchange of information and ideas… is daily becoming more constricted”. They welcomed efforts to interrogate prejudice in America; they deplored Donald Trump.
But the signatories observed that on campuses, in the media and online, “an intolerance of opposite views” is policed with “public shaming and ostracism” – and “more troubling still”, too many institutions cave in. Editors are fired; books withdrawn; academics investigated. Some who have dissented from establishment orthodoxies have even received death threats for daring to do so, including several leading feminist figures in the trans debate.
It is striking that when the fatwa was first issued against Sir Salman, among his most prominent defenders were figures on the Left – intellectuals and politicians who may not have agreed with him, but who saw the danger in allowing free speech to be curtailed by kowtowing to extremists. Today, such support has been less readily forthcoming: why were so many Left-wing politicians so slow to respond to Sir Salman’s attack?
But both sides of the political spectrum need to recognise the dangers of equivocation on this matter. The enemies of freedom will not rest until they have secured their desired objective of a society afraid to question, debate or speak out. The defenders of a free society should not rest, either.