Free You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom by Nick Cohen

braver than the citizens of Iran, Zimbabwe or Burma. National and political differences are no protection against the universal emotion of fear. Not the immediate fear that causes the eyeballs to dilate and the fight-or-flight response to kick in, but the niggling fear at the back of the mind that warns of the pressing need to avoid a fight in the first place.
    Hitoshi Igarashi was the only person associated with The Satanic Verses to pay for the Ayatollah’s blood lust with his life. Compared to the millions killed in wars and genocides in the years that followed the fatwa, the pain the enemies of the novel inflicted was small. But it was sufficient. The threats against Rushdie produced a fear that suffused Western culture and paralysed its best instincts. From then on, authoritarians seeking to restrict civil liberties or members of the political right led the opposition to militant Islamism. Liberals, who had the best arguments against theocracy, and who might have offered immigrants to Europe – particularly women immigrants to Europe – a better future, went absent without leave.
    The society around them imitated the craven politicians, bishops and rabbis rather than the workers in the bookshops and the editors at Penguin. It displayed little or no willingness to defend the potential victims of terror. In one of his rare interviews, Peter Mayer, Penguin’s chief executive, praised the bravery of everyone in the book trade who had defended his right to publish, but then told a bleak story about how strangers treated his family. He had received many death threats. Someone went to the trouble to cut themselves and send him a letter scrawled in blood. An anonymous telephone caller told Mayer that ‘not only would they kill me but that they would take my daughter and smash her head against a concrete wall’. Far from rallying to defend an innocent girl and her innocent father, the parents of her classmates demanded that the school expel her. What would happen, they asked, if the Iranian assassins went to the school and got the wrong girl?
    And Meyer thought, ‘You think my daughter is the right girl?’
    The same cowardice greeted him when he applied for a co-op apartment in New York. ‘There were objections that the Iranians could send a hit squad and target the wrong apartment. As if I had done something wrong.’
    Mayer spoke truer than he knew. After Rushdie, the fear of a knife in the ribs or a bomb at the office meant that liberals who stuck by liberalism were in the wrong. They knew the consequences now. If someone killed them, they were guilty of provoking their own murder. In the eyes of most politicians and most of the journalists, broadcasters, academics and intellectuals whose livelihoods depended on the freedom to debate and criticise, the targets of religious violence had no one to blame but themselves. The intensity of the rage against Rushdie allowed them to turn John Stuart Mill on his head. Mill argued that censorship could be justified only if a writer or speaker caused a direct harm – by urging on a mob to commit a crime, was his example. Rushdie did not incite violence. His opponents did. The harm was all on their side. However, governments and cultural bureaucracies came to believe that when religious mobs showed that they were prepared to murder Rushdie, they provided the justification for the censorship they sought.
    The attack on The Satanic Verses appalled liberals. The fight to defend it exhausted them. Knowing what they now knew, few wanted to put themselves through what Rushdie and Penguin had been through. Unlike the Western campaigns against apartheid, Franco, the Greek colonels and the Soviet Empire, a campaign for free speech would involve them running a slight risk of becoming the target of violence themselves. They soon found high-minded reasons to avoid it, and redefined their failure to take on militant religion as a virtuous act. Their preferred tactic was to extend arguments