ICYMI - Rex Murphy: Trudeau, Biden won't name actual threat to Salman Rushdie
So in all this reverential talk about “freedom of expression” why was that freedom not deployed to make the very necessary point that Rushdie’s life has been in danger because fundamentalist Islamists have been calling for his murder, and offering a huge reward for his death, for over 30 years. That is the most egregious and particular factor — the central fact of the villainous onslaught.
And for public statements by these two leaders, and others, not to reference that most salient fact, not to reference that an intolerant and fanatic faction had been urging his death, was — to use Orwell’s term — “objectively” a form of self-censorship, “objectively” again, to pay deference, by limiting comment, to the very intolerance and anti-expression of fundamentalist Islam. Which would not be paid by these same leaders to any other religion and emphatically not to the Christian faith.
Say it. Name the actual cause. And do not be content with the empty pieties about freedom of expression which evade the predominant motive. Here in the West over the last decade freedom of speech has been choked by wokeism, political correctness, the cancel-culture craze, imperious rulings from Twitter, and most recently by the hyper-agitated activists who have showered J.K. Rowling with vicious abuse and death threats, for who comments on trans issues.
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