History & Culture

“This issue 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.” – Salman Rushdie

Writes Bari Weiss on the stabbing in the neck of author Salman Rushdie who “has lived half of his life with a bounty on his head—some $3.3 million promised by the Islamic Republic of Iran to anyone who murdered him”:

We live in a culture in which many of the most celebrated people occupying the highest perches believe that words are violence. In this, they have much in common with Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who issued the first fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, and with Hadi Matar, the 24-year-old who, yesterday, appears to have fulfilled his command when he stabbed the author in the neck on a stage in Western New York.

The first group believes they are motivated by inclusion and tolerance—that it’s possible to create something even better than liberalism, a utopian society where no one is ever offended. The second we all recognize as religious fanatics. But it is the indulgence and cowardice of the words are violence crowd that has empowered the second and allowed us to reach this moment, when a fanatic rushes the stage of a literary conference with a knife and plunges it into one of the bravest writers alive.

[…] And yet as shocking as this attack was, it was also 33 years in the making: The Satanic Verses is a book with a very bloody trail.

She goes on to recount the horrific number of murders, stabbings, bookstore bombings and burnings, and anti-Rushdie riots, noting the courage of those defending Rushdie in the 1980s, and how the intellectuals of today condemn Rushdie, and those like him who dare to speak what they believe:

…the difference between civilization and barbarism is that civilization responds to words with words. Not knives or guns or fire. That is the bright line. There can be no excuse for blurring that line—whether out of religious fanaticism or ideological orthodoxy of any other kind.

Today our culture is dominated by those who blur that line—those who lend credence to the idea that words, art, song lyrics, children’s books, and op-eds are the same as violence. We are so used to this worldview and what it requires—apologize, grovel, erase, grovel some more—that we no longer notice. It is why we can count, on one hand—Dave Chappelle; J.K. Rowling—those who show spine.

Another lesson to draw from the attack is made by Daniel Pipes, noting that “Salman Rushdie was never safe“:

Will the rest of us learn from this sad tale? Russia and China are certainly great power foes, but Islamism is an ideological threat. Its practitioners range from the rabid (ISIS) to the totalitarian (the Islamic Republic of Iran) to the mock-friendly (the Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan). They threaten via propaganda, subversion, and violence. They mobilise not just in the caves of Afghanistan but in idyllic resort towns like Chautauqua, New York.

Related:

“If this spike in trans children is all biological, why is it regional? Either Ohio is shaming them or California is creating them.” – Bill Maher

Everywhere Marxism has been tried, its left destruction and death in its wake. Yet Marxism lives. From environmentalism with its rejection of free markets to Critical Race Theory which sees white patriarchy as the source of all evil, you’ll find Marxism at its root.

In this three-part series, C. Bradley Thomspon, Professor of Political Science at Clemson University, explores why Marxism has endured — even flourished — in the face of unremitting failure. Author of “The Redneck Intellectual” on Substack, and America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It.

In the first of a five-part series “Even black men can be fired for not being ‘woke’ enough“, a radio talk show canceled by Canada’s Bell Media and iHeartRadio demonstrates how individuals who are black are only useful to “liberals” when they repeat the slogans of their white intellectual masters. Those who do not conform to the “progressive” stereotype are kicked off the plantation.

Writes Jamil Jivani:

Wokeness—a political agenda with a superficial commitment to diversity and inclusion—has become a global ideological movement. And, more than government policy, it’s big corporations pushing this agenda and punishing those who refuse to comply.

Weeks after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis in 2020, Bell Media hired me to be part of the iHeartRadio talk network as a radio host. From my perspective, Bell Media/iHeartRadio recognized that despite its publicized commitment to valuing people from different backgrounds, they had yet to ever hire a fulltime black talk radio host in their Canadian market. What my experience made clear is that the company failed to consider what it would mean to sincerely engage someone from a black community, without expectations that we conform to the pressures of tokenism.

Elite institutions often make assumptions about a person’s political views based on what he looks like or where his parents are from. Soon after being hired, I could see that Bell Media/iHeartRadio erred in making the same assumptions. I felt that they were hoping to have hired a liberal stereotype of a black man who espouses their expected political talking points. Bell Media/iHeartRadio was not prepared for a black man who loves his country, rejects victimhood politics, maintains strong ties to his faith community, and shares heterodox views on a wide range of issues.

Read the rest.