["Terrorism does exist, we know that... How we fight it, in my
view, is going to be the great civilizational test of our time. Will
we become our enemy or not? Will we become intolerant as our enemy is
intolerant, or will we not?”]
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“WILL WE BECOME OUR ENEMY?”: AFTER SALMAN RUSHDIE ASSASSINATION
ATTEMPT, SEE RARE FREE SPEECH ADDRESS  
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Amy Goodman
August 15, 2022
Democracy Now!
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_ "Terrorism does exist, we know that... How we fight it, in my view,
is going to be the great civilizational test of our time. Will we
become our enemy or not? Will we become intolerant as our enemy is
intolerant, or will we not?” _

Hayfestival-2016-Salman-Rushdie, Andrew Lih (CC BY-SA 3.0)

 

Watch the video of this program here
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-- moderator

Renowned Indian British novelist Salman Rushdie is in critical
condition and faces a long road to recovery after he survived an
assassination attempt Friday morning in western New York. Rushdie is
one of the most highly acclaimed writers in the world today and has
lived underground for many years after facing systematic threats of
assassination for his writing. We feature Rushdie in his own words,
when he gave a rare speech in 2004 on the freedom of expression at an
event hosted by PEN America. “Will we become our enemy or not?
Will we become repressive as our enemy is repressive? Will we become
intolerant as our enemy is intolerant, or will we not?”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is _Democracy Now!_, democracynow.org. I’m Amy
Goodman, as we end the show today with the words of the acclaimed
novelist Salman Rushdie, Indian British writer, in critical condition
after he survived an assassination attempt on Friday. He was knifed 10
times, at least, as he was about to speak at a literary event at the
Chautauqua Institution, when a man wielding a knife climbed on stage
and began stabbing him. The attack left him hospitalized with severed
nerves in one arm, punctured liver, other injuries that left him on a
ventilator overnight. Rushdie’s agent says he’s likely to lose an
eye as a result of the assault.

Twenty-four-year-old Hadi Matar of New Jersey was restrained by
audience members, arrested, arraigned on Saturday, pled not guilty to
charges of attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon.
Prosecutors have not yet established a motive for the attack.

Salman Rushdie is one of the most highly acclaimed writers in world,
forced into hiding and lived underground for many years after the late
Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa in 1989 calling on Muslims
to assassinate Rushdie over his book _The Satanic Verses_, the novel
portraying the Qur’an in an unconventional light, modeling one of
its main characters on the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. The fatwa was
finally lifted by the Iran president in 1998.

Salman Rushdie is also former president of PEN America, which
supports persecuted writers worldwide. We end today’s show with
Salman Rushdie in his own words in a rare speech he gave in 2004 on
the freedom of expression at an event hosted by PEN America.

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Terrorism does exist. In this city of all cities, we
know that. We know what it exists — what it exists to do, what it
has done, what it tries to do. We know that it exists and must be
fought. I don’t think any of us would question that.

How we fight it, in my view, is going to be the great civilizational
test of our time. Will we become our enemy or not? Will we become
repressive as our enemy is repressive? Will we become intolerant as
our enemy is intolerant, or will we not? Will we fight with different
weapons, weapons of openness and acceptance and seeking to increase
the dialogue between peoples rather than decrease it? This is a big
test. Will we become, you could say, the suits of armor that our fear
makes us put on, or will we not?

It seems to us, in PEN, to many of us in the last months, that we are
not passing this test very well at present, and that there are serious
reasons to say that there is a crisis in this country of civil
liberties, freedom of speech and human rights, of exactly the kind
that PEN has spent over 80 years protesting about when it happens in
other countries, exactly the things that — not exactly, because
nothing, no parallel is ever exact, but the kind of things that we
have tried to highlight, whether it was in Cuba or Burma or Iran or
China, those sorts of problems are beginning to crop up here, problems
of what it is possible to say without being in trouble, what it is
possible to have access to the information media to talk about, the
terms in which it is possible to talk about these things when one does
have access to the news media, the way in which the government is
becoming increasingly intrusive into areas of our lives which the
government has no business to go into — what books we read, what
shops we go to, what books we borrow from universities, what do we
think about. That is — you know, this gets very close to the thought
police, and is something which is not acceptable in a free society.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Salman Rushdie speaking in 2004. He concluded
the evening by reading from the works of others.

SALMAN RUSHDIE: And finally, from former president of PEN, Norman
Mailer, he sent us the briefest contribution of anybody. Yeah. From
John Dos Passos in U.S.A.: “All right then, we are two nations.”

However, I also wanted to read from — from what Norman said in the
interview that is in the current issue of the _New York_ magazine,
in it, a conversation with his son. And this is how it ends. Norman
writes, or says, “Wisdom is ready to reach us from the most
unexpected quarters. Here, I quote from a man who became wise a little
too late in life:

“’Naturally, the common people don’t want war, but after all, it
is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always
a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy,
or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist
dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to
the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell
them that they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack
of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in
every country.’

“That was Hermann Goering speaking at the Nuremberg trials after
World War II. It is one thing to be forewarned. Will we ever be
forearmed?” Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s renowned Indian British author Salman Rushdie,
speaking in 2004 at a PEN America Center event at Cooper Union in
New York. On Friday, he was stabbed at least 10 times. He is now in
critical condition after that assassination attempt. That does it for
our show. I’m Amy Goodman. Stay safe.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United
States License [[link removed]].
Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some
of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be
separately licensed. For further information or additional
permissions, contact us.

* Salman Rushdie
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* War on Terror
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* Freedom of Speech
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