Rushdie Hate Update

Johann Hari does what Geoffrey Wheatcroft couldn't manage and identifies a member of the "fashionable academic-intellectual left" who does, indeed, seem to hate Salman Rushdie:

Backing him up, the Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal has jeered that Rushdie thinks "humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally Western ideas."

Even here, though, if you go back to Gopal's original piece in context, his argument isn't an apologia for the fatwa against Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. Rather, Gopal's argument is that that Rushdie, the one who believed "It was necessary to critique tyrannical forces in both west and non-west, to recognise them as twinned and to pronounce a plague on both their houses" has sold out. Now, "Vociferously supporting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq on "humane" grounds, condemning criticism of the war on terror as 'petulant anti-Americanism' and above all, aligning tyranny and violence solely with Islam, Rushdie has abdicated his own understanding of the novelist's task as 'giving the lie to official facts.'"

On the left, but not fashionable academics, Hari also has the goods on George Galloway and Lord Ahmed.

Comments

Maybe (hopefully!) someone said it in the other Rushdie thread, but I could certainly get my hate up for someone who wears slacks and running shoes. What does he think he is, a math teacher?

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | June 23, 2007 5:22 PM

I read the Gopal piece. That is pretty mild for "hate." It was definitely intended as a rebuke, but more from a sense that Rushdie has "sold out" and betrayed his former allegiances.

Posted by blah | June 23, 2007 11:55 PM

I saw Rushdie do a reading a year or so ago at a PEN event in NYC. A line in his introductory speech---"We cannot let The United States become a nation of torturers"--- was the most powerful thing I heard that night, even though there were many other great writers present and many great passages read.

Posted by Jackmormon | June 24, 2007 12:53 AM

priyamvada gopal is a female name.

Posted by vivek | June 24, 2007 2:47 AM

priyamvada gopal is a female name.

Posted by vivek | June 24, 2007 2:48 AM

The Gopal piece is indeed hostile to Rushdie but comes at it from a "more in sadness than anger" perspective that I would not qualify as hatred. I say the LeCarre feud comes closer to being an expression of hatred, although it is not clear he qualifies as "fashionable academic-intellectual left." Read my blog jerks!

Posted by Wido Incognitus | June 24, 2007 3:20 AM

...or the feud with Germaine Greer where Rushdie could be said to have decided that it was unacceptable for people to express their opposition to the novel Brick Lane, which they perceived as portraying them unflatteringly.

Posted by Wido Incognitus | June 24, 2007 3:24 AM

I hate him because he's married to a supermodel like, half his age. Whom to I have to get fatwahed by to get a chick like that to give me the time of day? The running shoes with dark suit are just a bonus. Maybe he has an endorsement contract with Reebok, the bastard.

Posted by Brian C.B. | June 24, 2007 9:13 AM

My memory of the first fatwah was that the fashionable North London leftie line was: "I support him even though Satanic Verses is a dreadful book."

The contrast with the ecstatic critical reception at publication (some months before the protests got going) was marked...

Posted by DavidS | June 24, 2007 9:41 AM

Being timid, my first impulse would have been to hold off on the honors for Rushdie until a more peaceful era, while at the same time trying to think of ways to oppose autocratic types who are trying to enrage religious communities around the world and to then ride the furor into political power.

Posted by ferd | June 24, 2007 11:07 AM

Well, it frosts me that Rushdie gets knighted and Ringo Starr doesn't. The Queen let George Harrison die without the honor (though McCartney is now Sir Paul), and Ringo might not have much longer. No one did more to bring Britain out of the postwar doldrums than the Beatles, and their contribution to world and British culture vastly outweigh Mr. Rushdie's.

Ringo is a national treasure-- the unflappable one, the funny one. All of the Beatles deserve knighthood (John and George posthumously), and the country can remedy that lack by honoring Ringo.

Posted by petra | June 24, 2007 5:24 PM