The attack on Salman Rushdie was an attack on democracy

The 12th of August 2022 will be etched in eternity as a dark, dark day for free speech.

Today, Saturday the 13th, an author is fighting for his life due to words he has written. WORDS. This should be absolutely unacceptable to anyone, no matter if you’re a free speech absolutist or a proud supporter of censorship. I have heard it said that “freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence”, and that may be true. The joy of free speech is that it allows criticism, even extreme dissent. But these consequences should never, ever extend to maiming somebody.

Let’s apply Newton’s third law of motion to discourse. Every action is entitled to have an equal and opposite reaction. The important word here is EQUAL. I do not consider someone stabbing someone in the neck to be an equal reaction to a book written well over thirty years ago, the controversy over which has mostly died down even in hardline Islamist circles. Rushdie is himself a Muslim by upbringing. The majority of people that ISIS, al-Qaeda and the like groom into terrorism were raised in secular enviroments or are new converts. Rushdie grew up around Islam, therefore he has way more of an understanding of how Islam works then these Johnny-come-latelys who saw the line “kill the infidel” in Quran 5 and took it way out of context (the verse refers to war booty). His interpretation, like that of the Alevi Muslims of Turkey, allows for criticism of orthodox Islam. The Alevis themselves openly joke about orthodox Muslims and even their own interpretation of the faith. Yet they, as a relatively small religious minority, are not targeted in the same way as a world-famous author. Many of the orthodox Muslims in regions where they practice consider them to be misguided at worst.

So why should one man be attacked so brutally for having a different interpretation of Islamic lore? A traditional Alevi song goes as follows:

Learn from your mistakes and be knowledgeable,
Don’t look for faults in others,
Look at 73 different people in the same way,
God loves and created them all, so don’t say anything against them.

Religious aspects aside, we are seeing a chilling precedent as of late that seeks to kosher physical attacks in reaction to words. The rationale is that words can lead to violence, or even act as a form of violence themselves, yet this doesn’t carry water with me. I have said in this space before that I am not a free speech absolutist, but my line in the sand is explicit calls for violence. I would be okay with someone saying “Salman Rushdie will burn in hell for disparaging the Prophet”, even though I do not agree with this statement at all. I would not be okay with “Salman Rushdie should be killed and I will be willing to pay whoever does it”, as it is a direct call to action in the present life.

This year alone, we have seen the famous American comedian Dave Chappelle attacked on stage by a person wielding a weapon in response to jokes he made about the trans community. If you believe Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars wasn’t staged, that counts too. And people have been defending this, rather than support articulating opposing views equal and oppositely. This is the end result. A man could still die because of a combination of religious extremism and the growing acceptance of disproportionate response to words. For decades, free speech has been under attack, but now things are getting physical (to paraphrase the late Olivia Newton-John).