The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Tangents: I am an admirer of Jimmy Carter–as a politician, as a president, as a post-president, as a human being–despite that “lust-in-my-heart” sanctimony that makes him sound like a latter-day Woodrow Wilson a bit too often. He was by far a better president than Wilson, whose deal-breaker will always be his un-reconstituted Southern racism despite giving us one of the greatest Supreme Court justices ever (Louis Brandeis). His other appointees were more forgettable (James McReynolds and John Clarke. Who?) But Carter on March 5, 1989, wrote one of the worst pieces of his career: “Rushdie’s Book Is an Insult,” published as an OpEd in The New York Times that day. The ayatollah’s fatwa–no need to capitalize either–had gone out against Rushdie for his Satanic Verses. Rushdie was in hiding. His near-murder in August 2022 was far off, though Carter would live long enough to see it (he is still alive as I write this). I hope he regrets that column, the way Rushdie himself regretted his pathetic “Now I Can Say I Am a Muslim” column in the same pages, on Dec. 28, 1990. Carter doesn’t regret it, judging from the fact that he still feature his insult at the Carter Center’s website. “The death sentence proclaimed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, however, was an abhorrent response, surely surprising even to Rushdie. It is our duty to condemn the threat of murder, to protect the author’s life and to honor Western rights of publication and distribution.” Good so far. But then: “At the same time, we should be sensitive to the concern and anger that prevails even among the more moderate Moslems.” Sure we should be sensitive. But who are “we”? To what extent does that sensitivity extend to a novelist’s responsibility not to explore what the novelist wants to explore? Why should we be so deferential to Muslim sensibilities as to restrict our own liberal, humanist, sometimes freely outrageous but always free minds’ willingness to go where they will, especially in fiction? Fiction! Carter was calling Rushdie’s novel “insulting” while Khomeini’s assassins were running around, while Khomeini’s madness (and Saddam Hussein’s) was mass graving the border between Iran and Iraq. But here’s what Carter said: “While Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms are important, we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah’s irresponsibility.” In the west we are directly insulted daily by myriad lesser fools. Grow a pair already. It means nothing to invoke the First Amendment (“freedom for the thought that we hate,” to quote the title of Anthony Lewis’s book on the subject) if the corollary is to invoke the stone-throwers. And on Aug. 12, 2022, Rushdie–whose works I have stopped liking a while back, but that’s irrelevant: my affection for him is of a different order–got knifed, lost his eyesight in one eye, and almost lost his life. Because the people Carter apologizes for—-an American citizen, Rushdie’s attacker: a California-born Lebanese, my own ancestry–are still running around, getting third-degree defenses from former presidents because they were insulted. “There’s a thing I used to say back in the day, when catastrophe rained down upon The Satanic Verses and its author,” Rushdie writes in Knife,  “that one way of understanding the argument over that book was that it was a quarrel between those with a sense of humor and those without one. I see you now, my failed murderer, hypocrite assassin, mon semblable, mon frère. You could try to kill because you didn’t know how to laugh.”

—P.T.

 

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Sometimes I think I belong to another age. I can remember being in the garden of our house as a child in the 1950s, listening to my parents and their friends laughing and joking as they discussed everything under the sun, from contemporary politics to the existence of God, without feeling any pressure to censor or dilute their opinions. I also remember being at the apartment of my favorite uncle, Hameed Butt, who sometimes wrote for the movies, and his dancer-actress wife, Uzra, who sometimes acted in them. I watched them playing cards with their artsy-filmi crowd, speaking in even more outrageous language about everything and nothing, and laughing even more uproariously than my parents’ friends. These settings were where I learned the first lesson of free expression—that you must take it for granted. If you are afraid of the consequences of what you say, then you are not free. When I was making The Satanic Verses, it never occurred to me to be afraid.

–From Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024).

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