Author Salman Rushdie, whose 1989 novel The Satanic Verses earned him a death fatwa from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, said last week that President Obama was wrong to avoid calling Islamic terrorism by its name.
“It’s a mistake that the president is making to not use the term Islamic terrorism,” Rushdie said at New York University’s Washington, D.C. Academic Center. “Because, of course, it’s not what a majority of Muslims would think or want. Of course, it’s a freakish manifestation that has grown up inside Islam. But to say that it’s not about Islam denies what the killers themselves always say.”
Rushdie, who grew up in what he has described as a “liberal Muslim family,” is now an atheist. Far from a conservative, he has been a frequent defender of Obama and a reliable critic of the Republican Party. But he has long opposed the liberal movement to embrace Islam without reservation.
“You know, if you have a group of murderers who say–all of them–that they do it in the name of a particular prophet and a particular ideology, to say it’s not about that is just self-evidently evading the truth,” Rushdie said. “The question is what has happened inside Islam that allowed this manifestation to grow up inside it. And it’s quite clear to me that the people who suffer most from Islamic terrorism are other Muslims.”
Rushdie would be unlikely to support hardline Republicans like Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, but he maintained that Democrats were erring too far in the other direction. “Something is happening inside Islam – not separate from it – inside it, and that needs to be defeated. We must first call it by its name.”
With this message, Rushdie joins a growing number of liberal atheists like Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins who don’t understand why so many of their political brethren are so willing to give Muslims a pass.
The answer, though, is fairly simple. Democrats look for any position that pits them against conservatives. It doesn’t matter if that forces them to embrace something silly, ridiculous, and indefensible. They have the entire mainstream media at their disposal, and they have gotten very good at spreading their propaganda. They still feel certain that their message of love and unity will overcome America’s suspicion of Islam.
The only problem is that Islamic terrorists keep killing people. And that’s a counter-message that not even the smoothest liberal talker in the country can overcome.
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