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This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.
I'm Barry Weiss and this is Honestly. For the people that need to hear this, words are violent. Words are violent. We live in a culture in which many people believe that words are violence. Stop saying you don't condone violence, you don't condone violence. Honey, words are violent.
In this, they have much in common with the Iranian Ayatollah, who issued the first fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie in 1989. And also with Hadi Matar, the 24-year-old who, a few days ago, appears to have fulfilled the supreme leader's command...
This was the scene shortly before 11 a.m., right after the moment a man was tackled after allegedly stabbing Salman Rushdie on stage. When he rushed to stage in western New York and stabbed Rushdie in the neck. This morning, writer Salman Rushdie, whose work has made him the subject of death threats, is hospitalized with serious injuries.
and is on a ventilator, we're told, after he was beaten and viciously stabbed several times. The first group believes that they are motivated by inclusion and tolerance, that it's possible to create something even better than liberalism, a kind of utopian society where everyone is safe and nobody's ever offended. The second we all recognize as religious fanatics. But actually the two groups are deeply connected.
It is the indulgence and cowardice of the words or violence crowd that has empowered the second and allowed us to reach this moment when a fanatic jumps on the stage of a literary conference with a knife in his hand and plunges it into one of the bravest writers alive. I've spoken on the same stage where Rushdie was set to speak that day.
You can't imagine a more bucolic place than the Chautauqua Institution. It's all old Victorian homes with screened-in porches and no locks on the doors. There's a lake, American flags and ice cream everywhere. It was founded in 1874 by Methodists as a summer colony for Sunday school teachers. And now it attracts the kind of parents and grandparents who love Terry Gross and never miss a wordle.
It's just about the last place in America where you would imagine an act of such barbarism. And yet as shocking as this attack was, it was also 33 years in the making. The Satanic Verses, Rushdie's novel inspired by the life of the Prophet Muhammad, is a book with a very bloody trail. In July 1991, the book's Japanese translator was stabbed to death outside of his office at a university northeast of Tokyo.
The same month, the book's Italian translator was also stabbed, this time at his home in Milan. Two years later, in July 1993, the book's Turkish translator and publisher was the target of an arson attack on a hotel. He escaped, but 37 others were killed. A few months later, Islamist came for the book's Norwegian publisher. He was shot three times outside of his home in Oslo and was critically injured.
And those are just the stories we remember. In 1989, 12 people were killed at an anti-Rashti riot in Mumbai, the author's birthplace, where the book was also banned. Five Pakistanis died in Islamabad under very similar circumstances. As for Rashti himself, after the fatwa, he took refuge in England, thanks to round-the-clock protection from the British government.
For more than a decade, he lived there under the name Joseph Anton, moving from safe house to safe house. In the first six months, he had to move 56 times. The satanic verses. They bought it not to read, but to burn.
Rushdie's book was burned by Muslims in the city of Bradford. Come on then. Come on then, you fucking bastard. Come on then. Can I have my book back? Fuck you. I'm going to burn this book.
And at the suggestion of British police, two WH Smith shops in Bradford stopped carrying the book. We are going to cause the Home Sedative Act and we are going to lobby the members of parliament to pass a bill so that the law of blasphemy can be strengthened so that it will enable us to have this book banned permanently and to prevent the publication of such blasphemous books in future.
Salman Rushdie has lived half of his life with a bounty on his head. And yet, it was in 2015, years after he had come out of hiding, that he told the French newspaper L'Express, we are living in the darkest time I have ever known.
Now, you would think that Rushdie would have said such a thing at the height of the chaos, when he was in hiding, when those associated with the book were being targeted for assassination. By 2015, you might run into Rushdie at Manhattan cocktail parties, or at the theater with a gorgeous woman on his arm, or in an item in page six. By 2015, he'd already been married and divorced to Padma Lakshmi, for God's sake.
So why did he say in 2015 that it was the darkest time he had ever known? Because what he saw was the weakening of the very values, the very Western values, like the ferocious commitment to free thought and free speech that had quite literally saved his life. If the attacks against satanic verses had taken place today, he said to the French paper, these people would not have defended me.
and would have used the same arguments against me, accusing me of insulting an ethnic and cultural minority. Rusty didn't have to imagine that. He didn't have to speculate. He said that because that is exactly what they did.
See, when Rushdie was under siege, the likes of Tom Wolfe and Christopher Hitchens and Norman Mailer and Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney stood up to defend him. I think it's been very sad that the religious leaders of the country have been so feeble. They've all either said nothing or, as in the case of Cardinal Archbishop O'Connor of New York, have said they think the book is blasphemous.
And they've, as it were, directed their criticism of their book instead of calling the Ayatollah Khomeini a blasphemer for using religion to mount a contract killing, which is what he's publicly done. The leader of that literary pack was Susan Sontag, who was then president of PEN America, and she arranged for the book to be read in public. Christopher Hitchens recalled that Sontag shamed members into showing up on Rushdie's behalf to show a little civic fortitude.
That courage she called for wasn't an abstraction, especially to some independent booksellers. Consider the heroism of Andy Ross, the owner of the now-shuttered Cody's Books in Berkeley, which carried Rushdie's book and was bombed shortly after the fatwa was issued. After the bombing, Ross gathered all of his staff for a meeting. Here's Andy Ross. "'I stood and told the staff that we had a hard decision to make,'
We needed to decide whether to keep carrying satanic verses and risk our lives for what we believed in, or to take a more cautious approach and compromise our values. So we took a vote. The staff voted unanimously to keep carrying the book. Tears still come to my eyes when I think of this. It was the defining moment in my 35 years of bookselling. It was the moment when I realized that bookselling was a dangerous and subversive vocation and
because ideas are powerful weapons. I didn't know at that moment whether this was an act of courage or foolhardiness, but from the clarity of hindsight, I would have to say that it was the proudest day of my life. That was America in the late 1980s. By 2015, America was a very different place.
When Rushdie made those comments to L'Express, it was in the fallout of PEN, the country's premier literary group, deciding to honor the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo with an award. Months before, a dozen staff members of Charlie Hebdo were murdered by two terrorists in their offices in France. It was impossible to think of a publication that deserved to be recognized and elevated more for their heroism.
And yet the response from more than 200 of the world's most celebrated authors was to protest the award. Famous writers like Joyce Carol Oates, Laurie Moore, Michael Cunningham, Rachel Kushner, Peter Carey, Junot Diaz suggested that maybe the people who had just seen their friends murdered for publishing a satirical magazine were a little bit at fault.
that if something offends a minority group, that perhaps it shouldn't be printed at all. And those cartoonists were certainly offensive, even the dead ones. They accused Penn of valorizing selectively offensive material, material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world. Here's how Salman Rushdie responded to their letter.
This issue, he wrote, has nothing to do with an oppressed and disadvantaged minority. It has everything to do with the battle against fanatical Islam, which is highly organized, well-funded, and which seeks to terrify us all, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, into a cowed silence. He was right. They were wrong.
and their civic cowardice, as Sontag may have described it, is in no small part responsible for the climate we find ourselves in today. The words or violence crowd is right about one thing. They're right about the power of language. Words are powerful. They can be vile and disgusting and offensive and dehumanizing. They can make the speaker worthy of scorn, of protest, and of blistering and relentless criticism.
But the difference between civilization and barbarism is that civilization responds to words with words, not knives, not guns, not fire. And there can be no excuse for blurring that line, whether out of religious fanaticism or ideological orthodoxy of any other kind. Yet today our culture is dominated by those who blur that line.
Those who lend credence to the idea that words or art or song lyrics or children's books or op-eds are the same as violence. Of course it's in 2022, when words are literally violence, and J.K. Rowling and Dave Chappelle literally put trans lives in danger. And even talking about anything that might offend anyone means you are literally arguing that I shouldn't exist. Of course it's now.
when we're surrounded by silliness and indulgence and weakness and self-obsession, that a man gets on stage and plunges a knife into Rushdie, plunges it into his liver, plunges it into his arm, plunges it into his eye. That is violence. Ideas do not have the right to be protected. It's perfectly right that you should protect people
of this or that religion against hateful attacks. But it's not correct that you ring fence the things people think. It must be possible for us to disagree with people's ideas.
Even if those ideas are given the kind of protection of some kind of religious belief system, what you can't do is to persecute people for believing differently than you. So I make a distinction between protecting human beings but not protecting ideas.
Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.
There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Thanks for listening.
This episode also appeared as a column that I wrote over the weekend in our newsletter, Common Sense. If you liked it and you want to support the work that we do, please go subscribe today at commonsense.news. We'll be back with a full-length episode later this week. See you then.