Salman Rushdie’s Stabbing Shows the Danger of Conflating Words With ‘Violence’
Daily Beast | Greg Lukianoff and Robert Shibley
FIRE leaders Lukianoff and Shibley respond to the Rushdie attack: “The message sent by a successful attack on Rushdie is loud and unmistakable: Your hurtful speech is the equivalent of violence against me and my values, and you deserve violence in return.” The authors present the only two choices for conflict resolution: “Free speech...[or] authoritarian repression.”
Citing campus surveys equating speech to violence, the authors write that “if violence and hurtful speech are actually equivalent, it’s not only logical to answer speech with violence, it’s impossible to cogently argue that you shouldn’t. A downward spiral towards violence is guaranteed.”
“The vast majority of Americans who say that violent responses to speech are sometimes acceptable will nevertheless be appalled by the attack on Rushdie. Yet they must come to grips with the fact that today’s attack, multiplied thousands of times, is how a society where violence is acceptable protest to speech would actually look. Free speech, and the peaceful version of conflict resolution it enables, is the only solution to this problem that does not require authoritarian repression.”
Related:
Some Lives Matter More: Why haven't U.S. elites rallied to the cause of Salman Rushdie as they did for Jamal Khashoggi? (The Scroll, 9/7/22)
I once wanted to burn ‘The Satanic Verses.’ Now I weep for Salman Rushdie. (Washington Post, 8/16/22)—by FA Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Writers Gather to Read Salman Rushdie and Support Free Speech (NYT, 8/20/22)
The Stabbing of Salman Rushdie Renews Free Speech Debates: After the attack, writers and world leaders hailed Rushdie as a symbol of free expression. But the battle lines around his novel “The Satanic Verses” were never cleanly drawn. (NYT, 8/15/22)
The New York Times’s strange Rushdie silence (Spectator World, 8/16/22)
Rushdie’s Moral Heroism (Quillette, 8/14/22)
Salman Rushdie’s Stabbing Shows the Danger of Conflating Words With ‘Violence’ (The Daily Beast, 8/13/22) by Greg Lukianoff
The best response to Salman Rushdie’s stabbing: The illiterate cannot be allowed to dictate the rules of literature. (Spectator World, 8/12/22) by FAIR Advisor Douglas Murray
All Because Salman Rushdie Wrote a Book*(Atlantic, 8/12/22)
