Christopher Hitchens has a useful piece in Vanity Fair. He recaps the fatwa on Rushdie and briefly works through the various outrages since then, Theo van Gogh, the Danish cartoons and the rest. His main points: that the problem for us now is self-censorship and that the multi-culti excuse-mongers need to reckon with the long lists of distinguished writers from the Muslim world who are as outraged as people in the West that their religion is invoked by hateful fanatics. I call it useful for latecomers to these debates – but it doesn’t hurt any of us to go over this ground regularly.
When Iran?s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on novelist Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, it was the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom. Two decades later, the violence continues, and Muslim fundamentalists have gained a new advantage: media self-censorship. ? more