Daniel Pipes on warning Rushdie
Daniel Pipes gets to say “I told you so” to Rushdie.
I wondered about the seeming lack of security around Rushdie that enabled his attacker to get so close to him. Scott Johnson has an interview with Daniel Pipes at Powerline that sheds some light on this:
I kept warning him, six times in all between 1990 and 2007, to take the death edict seriously and not to fool himself into thinking he was safe just because he had not yet been attacked. He not only ignored me but prompted his friend, the writer Christopher Hitchens, to ridicule me…
Rushdie chose to live in the United States and he refused security when it was offered him…
And yet it’s also understandable that Rushdie might be strongly motivated to “fool himself” and let down his guard. He had lived in virtual isolation for ten years after the edict was issued thirty-three years ago. To have gone on like that indefinitely would have been a burden so enormous that he might well want to take his chances. However, some sort of compromise involving major security would have seemed reasonable.
Looking at the content of the piece that in the interview was linked on the words “I kept warning him,” I see that Pipes has documented those warnings that he issued to Rushdie over the many long years since the edict against Rushdie’s life was first issued. Pipes was remarkably consistent in saying, in no uncertain terms, that the order to kill Rushdie would last as long as Rushdie lived and that Rushdie should continue to take it very very seriously and act accordingly.
And some of Rushdie’s statements, quoted there, definitely indicate that he wanted as little security as possible. For example, this from 2021:
May 15, 2021 update: Rushdie acknowledged his tendency to fantasy in an interview: “It’s true, I am stupidly optimistic, and I think it did get me through those bad years, because I believed there would be a happy ending, when very few people did believe it.”
It makes psychological sense, as I said earlier. Who can continue to live in such a highly restricted way, when every passing year indicates the danger may be past? Someone like Pipes must have sounded like Poe’s gloomy Raven to Rushdie, perched above the door and muttering incessant words of gloom.
It seems that Rushdie will survive the very serious attempt on his life that occurred the other day, although with permanent problems such as the loss of an eye. I wonder whether he will finally agree to heightened security after this ordeal.
[NOTE: By the way, corny cliche though it has become, that poem “The Raven” still gives me a cold chill when I read it. What a tour de force.]
He will only agree to heightened security if he now accepts that his surviving the murder attempt is certain to fuel more attempts on his life. The fatwa was for his death, not his disablement. Nothing less than his death will satisfy that fatwa. Devout fundamentalist Muslims take a fatwa as a direct command by Allah, transmitted through his Mullahs and Imams.
In many ways, I hold in high regard Rushdie’s steadfast refusal to hide behind guards.
Being attacked or killed proves the “satanic” part of “Satanic Verses.” To kill or attempt to do so in service of stamping out speech makes Rushdie’s point for him.
Choose the hill from which you will not retreat. I think that’s a good thing.
I can see not wanting to spend 35 years — half your life — in hiding, but hiring guards would have been prudent measure, and something he could probably afford, at least for public appearances. Chautauqua is a survival of friendly, optimistic, 19th century small town America. Like a lot of Americans, they don’t really understand the wider world and its dangers.
@ M Smith > “Chautauqua is a survival of friendly, optimistic, 19th century small town America. Like a lot of Americans, they don’t really understand the wider world and its dangers.”
Maybe Arizona and Texas could send them a couple of busloads of new neighbors.
@ M Smith > “I can see not wanting to spend 35 years — half your life — in hiding”
The point is, he hasn’t been in hiding since the first 10 years IIRC; what took the Jihad so long?
It’s not like there weren’t any terrorists wandering around in America over the last quarter century —
In europe as his memoit indicates he was heavily guarded in the us on the other hand the regime looks the other way
The little Red enclaves think that they are immune, but advertising and the highway net bring the modern evils to their door steps.
The Chautaugua was negligent, arrogant, and careless. The fatwa against Rushdie was revoked by the Iranian state, not by the originating religious leadership. He still had a target on his back.
Invite the World, and get the World and all its evils. They don’t play by small town rules. Grow up or get used to mopping up blood and attending funerals. The World don’t play “nice”.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t pre-fatwa Rushdies a relentless critique of the West and Western civilization?
Alan Parsons Project: The Raven
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAE1XTvKLXA
From the excellent album, Tales of Mystery And Imagination
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3keEiSoQ8J0
Note that, if you only heard this in the original vinyl, you missed out on the Orson Welles audio track recorded during the recording sessions, but elided from the original vinyl release, and added back in for the CD release.
}}} Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t pre-fatwa Rushdies a relentless critique of the West and Western civilization?
Yes, but Western Civ is brave enough to withstand and counter criticism, or has been for most of its 400 year span.
Islam has never been able to withstand such. All indications are that Allah is a puny god.
Some years back, I encountered a HS teacher doing AP Spanish. One of her students was the US-born daughter of Saudi immigrants…professionals. She wore the whole head-to-toe garb and followed Ramadan but otherwise seemed perfectly assimilated. Nice kid. Great student.
Comes time to cove el Cid. She wants a different subject since this demeans her faith.
An eleventh-century skull buster demeans her faith?
Rodrigo was born too poor to live off his estates and too noble to to actually work so he went into business as a private military contractor. Fought for and against Christians, for and against Muslims in their little kingdomish squabbles. Likely got folded into the Matter of Spain because he cashed his last check fighting Muslims, but that was the luck of the draw.
And a thousand years later, even learning about him demeans her faith?
Point is, somebody taught her this. And that somebody had been taught that and so on ad infinitum back a thousand years.
What else might be in her mind as to How Things Should Be that we don’t hear about?
Remember, somebody taught her this about the Cid. Took the time. Had the time. Had been taught. Thought it important enough that even learning about it in high school was a kind of poison. Against the faith.
I don’t think it’s paranoid to ask…what else?
He started the long march to liberate al andalus, so obviously problematic
One of the antagonisfs in my novel call him the andalusian ibn jubayr
Rushdie is foolish. The term arrogant prick is apt.
The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was murdered. The Italian and Norwegian translators survived attacks. Rushdie lived for a while with Bono of the Irish rock group U2, which, when it was revealed after Rushdie moved elsewhere, gave Bono a chance to emit massive quantities of smug.
The Brits cut diplomatic ties, then restored them when the Iranian government sort of backed away from the fatwa. But the religious leaders never backed off and the Brits are standing with their hands in their pockets, looking at the sky and whistling “Jerusalem.”
Biden et al, which were unanimously horrified at the Saudis bumping off an operative for the Saudi opposition within the House of Saud, have nothing at all to say about the fatwa. See more recent posts.
I’d like to say it couldn’t happen to a bigger shit. Rushdie has, after all, been perfectly encouraging of regimes silencing voices he doesn’t like. But we cannot and should not tolerate that kind of crap. We will, though.