The best thing about the Lehrmann judgment? Its slowness in a time of dangerous speed

Salman Rushdie was living under a fatwa for 33 years, so when he was attacked by a knife-wielding assassin at a literary talk in upstate New York in 2022, he wasn’t totally shocked.

“I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way,” he writes in his new memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, published this week. “So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, ‘So it’s you. Here you are.’”

In reading the coverage of the memoir, an account of a stabbing that has horrid resonance for Australians this week, I was struck by one detail. Rushdie’s attacker, it was reported, had only read a couple of pages of The Satanic Verses, the novel for which Rushdie earned his fatwa from Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989.

The book’s alleged blasphemy relates to its treatment of the prophet Muhammed, but Rushdie’s assailant, who awaits trial for the stabbing, only knew that Rushdie was “someone who attacked Islam”.

Trying to understand the motivations of lone-man stabbing attackers is like staring into the void. But attempting to murder someone based on a couple of pages of fiction struck me as particularly desolate, a morality tale for contemporary times.

The Atlantic called the man, who was 24 years old when he attacked Rushdie, “a Lee Harvey Oswald for the age of religious terrorism and YouTube”.

In the age of disinformation, it often feels that the speed with which people jump to extreme positions is matched only by their passion for those positions, and their hatred for those who oppose them.

Following the horrific stabbings in Sydney’s Bondi Junction last weekend, social media immediately lit into two camps – those who assumed the attack must have been an instance of Islamic terrorism, and those who advanced the story that the perpetrator was a Jewish man.

Both narratives were utterly false, and both sides had motivations that were not so much ideological as plain bigoted. Both sides reacted with the speed that has become the marker of our age, a speed enabled by the internet but which naturally spills into the “real”, non-online world. For example, the internet-borne misinformation about the Bondi Junction mall massacre was repeated in the mainstream media, always rushing to get a story out as quickly as possible.

Following the shocking church stabbing of Assyrian Christian leader Mar Mari Emmanuel in Wakeley in Sydney’s west, a truculent crowd formed quickly at the scene. They attacked police who were there to render help to the victims. The mob was responding to images from the livestream of the Bishop’s stabbing, which went viral almost immediately.

This speed was matched at a governmental level when the stabbing, by a troubled teenager reported to have mental health issues, was labelled by authorities as a terror attack, within 24 hours. The 16-year-old has now been charged.

The police didn’t have much choice to move so quickly in designating it a terror attack, given video of the teenage assailant was circulating so widely online. In that video, the attacker can reportedly be heard saying in Arabic “If he [the bishop] didn’t get himself involved in my religion, if he hasn’t spoken about my prophet, I wouldn’t have come here … if he just spoke about his own religion, I wouldn’t have come”.

The speed of the internet amped up the pace of “real life” – the offline world of policing and the uncertain art of managing social cohesion.

Against the backdrop of these two horrible stabbing events, on Monday Justice Michael Lee of the Federal Court delivered his considered judgement in the Bruce Lehrmann defamation case. There was nothing speedy about it. Lee deliberated for months and the result of the deliberations was long: a 324-page judgement. Even in its compressed version, the reasoning lasted for over two hours when read aloud.

The findings were both emphatic and nuanced, and the delivery format was also novel for the internet age. We didn’t scroll the judge’s decision, and it wasn’t broken down into small pieces for digital consumption. Lee read it out, and his sentences were sometimes paragraph-length, with many sub-clauses nestled within.

In his opening remarks, Lee commented about the tribes that have formed around the case. He said that several observers “have a Rorschach test-like response to this controversy and fasten doggedly upon the ‘truth’ as they perceive it”. Their response, he said, is visceral, “because the ‘truth’ is revealed and declaimed, rather than proven and explained”.

He criticised Channel Ten, which broadcast the original interview with Higgins, along similar lines. Lee said the network failed to question the political cover-up narrative pushed by Higgins and her partner David Sharaz, who “pitched” the story to Channel Ten. Lee found no evidence for any political conspiracy, and said the journalists at Ten should have been led by the facts, just as he was.

This week, a journalist named Uri Berliner from the left-leaning American National Public Radio – a leader in audio, long-form journalism – wrote an article saying NPR had betrayed its listeners. He claimed NPR had begun to skew its reporting away from truths its progressive culture found inconvenient. It had strayed from “journalism that lets evidence lead the way” and veered into activism.

Examples he advanced included the treatment of the story of the origins of the COVID virus and the organisation’s steadfast refusal to treat seriously the Wuhan lab leak theory, NPR’s coverage of trans rights issues and the Israel-Hamas war.

In his essay, Berliner said that despite an emphasis on cultural diversity at NPR, there was no commitment to a diversity of viewpoints. NPR staff rejected the claims, saying he cherry-picked examples and betrayed his colleagues in a public forum. In the days after his essay was published, NPR accepted his resignation.

It seems we have increasing difficulty in integrating disparate views, and having civil disagreements. A vicious cycle is set up when we know we have to defend our positions vociferously because any back-down will be treated with bad faith by online enemies.

The only antidotes are slowness, nuance, and a tolerance for complexity – all things that are increasingly rare.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.

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