Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The shameful truth – terrorism works

This is a bleak version of looking on the bright side, but what’s astonishing about last week’s vicious stabbing in upstate New York is that such an attack didn’t occur decades ago. However sickeningly incapacitated at present, Salman Rushdie himself would doubtless agree. Having survived unharmed for 33 years under a death sentence – endorsed by a depressingly hefty proportion of Muslims – was no mean feat. Yet that’s too long to maintain nonstop vigilance. Little wonder that Rushdie and his minders let down their guards.

Coming unnervingly close to fulfilling its lethal intent, the frenzied assault at one of the world’s most painfully harmless gatherings (and I should know) – the literary festival – is wretched news not only for the esteemed novelist, his family, friends and readers, but for all writers and our audiences. Because, if experience serves, the response to this attempted murder is apt to materialise in two layers, like a gleaming vanilla icing slathered on a mud pie.

We’ve already seen the vanilla bit: fellow fiction writers such as Hanif Kureishi and J.K. Rowling (whose own life was threatened for expressing her solidarity) decrying the violence against one of our own and underscoring the importance of the right to free speech. Countless columnists have followed suit. However laudable, these exhortations fall sneakily flat. When couched in generalities, defences of free speech tend to come across as dreary and obvious (again, I should know). Only in the particular do these discussions get interesting.

The UK abandoned the principle of free expression the moment it brought in laws against ‘hate speech’

We saw a similar uproar after the Islamist murders of Charlie Hebdo journalists in Paris in 2015, and not merely from the great and the good: huge candle-carrying crowds rallied around the slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’. So the form is that we all agree we mustn’t allow these dreadful people to cramp our style, declaiming that in western democracies it’s the fanatics who have to get with our programme, not the other way around.

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