Salman Rushdie on censorship in America today

60 extra minutes The human race has a very powerful survival instinct and when your survival is at risk, it takes control, takes charge and becomes the supreme force of will. This week for 60 minutes I sat down with writer Salmon Rushi, it's his first big piece of television. interview since he was attacked at a literary festival in Chitaka, New York, in August 2022, that summer day, a man with a knife went on stage trying to kill Rushy, but it was an act of violence that took 30 years to brewing in 1989, Iran's leader Ayatollah Ki issued a fatwa against Rashi that ordered all Muslims to kill him the controversy arises from his novel The Satanic Verses that the Aah Consider Blasphemous Our first story is about a man who is still trying to dodging a bullet in 1990 Mike Wallace went to a secret location in London to talk to Salon Rushy, who was alive and hiding at the time, was still optimistic that he could reconcile with his critics.

I have to hope that the atmosphere is gradually changing. I think there are several signs that it could be, where do you get it? those signs oh just in the air you know and it seems to me that you know in this country I don't think that the um there are actually a lot of people who are seriously interested in doing me some harm um uh I I don't think that's the case in the United States either. , You know. I don't think most Muslims, like most people, are quite reasonable. In fact, the world contains very few bloodthirsty people, but despite his optimism, he would have to remain hidden.

About nine more years after that interview you didn't actually see a knife. I didn't see the knife. I thought he hit me. The man who stabbed Rushy 15 times in 2022 is a Muslim from New Jersey. He said he had only read a couple of pages of the Satanic Verses and watched some clips of the author on YouTube, but that was enough for him to feel that Rush's words had attacked Islam in our conversation. I asked Rushi about his thoughts on the state of free speech on Today in America this is a bad time for free speech because the attack comes from so many different directions that it used to be that very conservative voices were the places from which I heard that this or that book should be banned or that it is obscene. or it's disgusting or whatever and there's a whole project to deny children the ability to learn about the history of their own country um and the role that race has played in that history, which is central.

What's different now is that it also comes from Progressivism. There are voices that there are progressive voices that say that certain types of expression should not be allowed because they offend this or that vulnerable group. There seems to be a sort of growing orthodoxy, especially among young people, and that

censorship

in those circumstances is a good thing, you know? There is a left-wing movement and a right-wing movement and one of the arguments I always try to make is that if you look at the history of

censorship

in places where there has been censorship, the first groups that suffer from it are minority groups.

So supporting censorship in theory on behalf of vulnerable groups is a very slippery slope. You know it leads to the opposite of what you want. Is there value in listening to voices that offend us? Huge value. I mean, how could we challenge ourselves if we had it? I don't question it, you know, I mean, there's a kind of offense in the industry now. Offense has become an aspect of identity politics. My opinion is that it is very easy for a book to stop offending you, you just close it, at that point it loses its ability to offend you. read you know a book of three four of 500 pages to offend you you are doing a lot of work to offend you MH this did not bother to inform himself about the man he had decided to kill at his core, Rush is a writer, his new knife published this week is his way to accept his assassination attempt.

He says that he is put off by people who only know him because of the threats to his life, not because of his life of storytelling. My desire to be a writer was entirely to do with a love for the power of the imagination to imagine worlds, to create worlds for readers and inhabitants to interact with their imaginations, you know, and I wish they weren't obscured by shadow of this type of event if that attack had been successful, how? Do you want people to remember you as a novelist? That's why I became a writer. I did not do it.

I didn't become a writer to tell my own story. You know, my friend Martin Amos had a saying about what you want to leave behind. it's a shelf of books you want to be able to say from here to here is me, I mean, I have the shelf of books, that's what I want people to look at and I hope some of them last, you know, and that's what you just want you want your books to be there for people to discover