Andrew Bolt: War on free speech is now waged everywhere

The horror attack on author Sir Salman Rushdie highlights that the war on free speech is now waged everywhere.

Why hasn’t our government demanded Iran’s ambassador explain its incitement to murder Sir Salman Rushdie, now lying blinded and unable to speak in a New York hospital?

So the coward’s circus starts again, this time because Rushdie has been stabbed in the throat and eye by a Muslim fanatic who wanted the great author silenced forever.

How symbolic of our degenerating times: to slash the throat that speaks and the eye that reads.

More sick symbolism: Rushdie was attacked at a literary festival as he prepared to speak on America as an “asylum for writers”.

Asylum? Not any more. The war on free speech is now waged everywhere, yet we see the same purely performative outrage.

True, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese denounced this “sickening and cowardly attack”, but didn’t once mention Iran’s shameful role or order Iran’s ambassador be read the riot act.

It’s like this attack – what can you do? – was just some random horror.

Salman Rushdie was attacked at a literary festival.

“Motive unknown,” an SBS headline announced on Sunday.

Unknown? A 24-year-old Lebanese Muslim – an admirer of the Hezbollah terrorist group and Iran’s Islamist regime – stabs some 75-year-old who’d just happened to have been sentenced to death by Iran’s Supreme Leader for his 1988 book The Satanic Verses, mocking Islam.

He does this less than a week after Iran’s official online news site called Rushdie’s death sentence “an unforgettable verdict for Muslims”, five years after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini reaffirmed that fatwa, and 10 years after a regime-controlled charity upped the reward for killing Rushdie to $4m.

“Motive unknown”? In Iran, newspapers close to Khomeini sure think they know: “a thousand bravos”, “divine vengeance”, “the hand of the man who tore the neck of God’s enemy must be kissed”.

To repeat: these newspapers, linked to Iran’s highest religious authority, praise as “divine” an attack in which Rushdie was stabbed three times in the neck, four times in the stomach, once in the right eye, three times in the chest, and once in the leg.

The ABC typically explained this as a faults-on-both-sides difference of opinion: Rushdie had “seemed to mock some of the most sensitive tenets of Muslim religious beliefs”.

But lots of people mock lots of things without having their throat slashed and eye stabbed. What the ABC never explained is why criticising Islam is so lethal.

And how should the West react?

Critical questions, because this war against the West’s free speech is now fought on Western soil.

Rushdie has long been a target.

A bomb plot against him failed when the Lebanese would-be assassin blew himself up, but Rushdie’s Japanese editor was murdered, Norwegian publisher shot and Italian translator stabbed.

And he hasn’t been the only target.

Muslim terrorists in 2015 murdered 12 people at the Paris newspaper Charlie Hebdo for publishing cartoons mocking Islam, and a French teacher was beheaded in 2020 for showing students the cartoons in a lesson on free speech.

Dutch director Theo van Gogh was murdered for his film criticising Islam, and Danish cartoons of Muhammad triggered assassination plots.

For sure, there were protests around the West against the Hebdo murders, and it almost seemed like we meant it.

Australians also chanted “Je suis Charlie” – I am Charlie – in defiance.

In truth, we crumbled.

Our newspapers refused to publish the Hebdo or Danish cartoons, and US president Barack Obama told the United Nations “the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam”.

A British teacher who last year showed his class a Hebdo cartoon was suspended.

But something even worse happened. Many on the Left seemed inspired by the Islamist war on our free speech. See, it worked!

They are now the jihadis of our woke generation, now demanding “trigger warnings” or bans on speech they, too, claim is “harmful”.

They’ve disrupted speeches by people from Bettina Arndt to Geert Wilders.

They’ve dragged Tasmania’s Catholic Archbishop into an anti-discrimination tribunal for explaining church teachings on gay marriage.

Two of my articles questioning race-shifting were banned by a judge, I was assaulted in the street, and Professor Peter Ridd was sacked for (correctly) criticising alarmist claims about the “dying” Great Barrier Reef.

Around the West, same story.

Author JK Rowling is deplatformed for not agreeing a man can be a woman.

A British man was arrested two weeks ago for retweeting a picture of Pride flags forming a swastika.

Once protesters in the West chanted “Je suis Charlie”.

Now we’re the murderers of our own free speech.

Just look. See many tears for Rushdie?