
Inside politics
Why radicals were Rushdie’s staunchest supporters
The trouble with liberals, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, is that they’re hopeless at conflict. “When a liberal says, ‘There is no culture war’, what I hear is: ‘Please let there be no culture war. Otherwise, I shall have to fall out with my friends.’” It was the same in 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini called for Salman Rushdie’s death over The Satanic Verses. An old clip of Liberal Democrat Shirley Williams shows her “almost physically pained” at having to stand by her free-speech convictions; John le Carré, “at his relativising worst”, said Rushdie had “nothing to prove but his own insensitivity”. It’s telling that in the end his staunchest supporters – Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens – were not liberals but radicals. “Knowing the extremist temperament from the inside-out, they had no illusions about it.”