The savage attack on Sir Salman Rushdie last Friday was a shocking illustration of the continuing threat to free expression within our society.
Since that barbarous incident in New York state, politicians, artists, authors and commentators have lined up to express their outrage and declare their support for the rights of everyone to be able to voice their opinions and tell their stories without fear.
But it would be easier to take those words seriously if so many of our cultural leaders, especially publishers, broadcasters and educators, had not shamefully colluded with intolerance in the past.
This week they mouth their slogans about freedom. But in their actions over recent years, they too often have been the allies of totalitarianism, hounding dissenters and enforcing groupthink. They endlessly trumpet their devotion to diversity, but they have only contempt for diversity of opinion.
Shameful
The cracks in the liberal facade of resolution began to show almost as soon as the mullahs of Iran had issued their fatwa against Rushdie in 1989 after the publication of his fourth novel The Satanic Verses. Even at the time, there were many public figures who equivocated or even sided with the bigots and book-burners.
One particularly shameful example was Baroness Shirley Williams of the Liberal Democrats — whose party is supposed to have the defence of liberty at its core.
The savage attack on Sir Salman Rushdie last Friday was a shocking illustration of the continuing threat to free expression within our society
She told a BBC Question Time audience in 2007 that he had ‘deeply offended Muslims in a very powerful way’, had been protected by the British police ‘at great expense to the taxpayer’, and said that giving him a knighthood was a ‘mistake’.
The obsession with not giving any offence to any vocal minority is now the central theme of the cultural cringe that prevails in our public life. Dressed up in the language of ‘inclusion’ and ‘equality’, this enfeebled attitude is now used to justify an accelerating surrender to extremism. I think it is no exaggeration to say that, because of the presence of Islamist militancy, we now have a de facto blasphemy law in this country.
When a teacher in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, made a reference to the Prophet Muhammad last year during a lesson, he was soon hounded out of his job by a mob of protesters and remains in hiding.
Today, no publisher would dream of touching a book like The Satanic Verses. The fear of accusations of Islamophobia prevails throughout the arts and literature, building a climate of censorship.
In June, the film The Lady Of Heaven, about the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, was pulled from cinemas after protests by angry Muslim demonstrators.
But religion is just one aspect of this creeping kind of Orwellian thought control. It can also be found in the maniacal desire to punish any deviation from the prescribed orthodoxy on race, multiculturalism, or — above all — transgender rights.
As a former successful writer myself, whose literary career was destroyed by the unfair accusation of transphobia, I recognise only too well the devastating impact of this new-style McCarthyism.
Until this trans row exploded, I had enjoyed success on both sides of the Atlantic with novels written for a fantasy series, under the name Erin Hunter.
In June, the film The Lady Of Heaven, about the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, was pulled from cinemas after protests by angry Muslim demonstrators
But then I committed what was deemed to be a ‘thought crime’ by the vociferous trans lobby. My offence had been to add to my Twitter page the hashtag: ‘I Stand with J.K. Rowling.’
Now, Joanne Rowling is probably the most successful author in the history of the world, a woman of incredible creativity and imagination. But in our twisted world of toxic identity politics, she has been turned into a figure of hate by the witch-hunters of the Twitter mob because she perpetrated the heresy of questioning some of the shibboleths of the trans dogma.
She herself is the target of continual abuse and death threats. Just hours after the Rushdie attack, a Twitter user based in Pakistan warned her ‘You’re next’.
In another indicator of the hysteria generated by the trans activists, scores of young, well-paid, privileged professionals at her publishing house Hachette wailed through their tears that they could not work on her next book because of her transphobia.
Rowling’s phenomenal earning power meant that her publisher and agent were willing to stand up to the cry bullies. Many others, without her wealth, have been less fortunate. When I was targeted by the trans agitators for my J.K. Rowling hashtag, my agent and publisher meekly caved in, and I was out in the cold.
Frenzied
I have not been able to write a book since then, and have had to retrain as an HGV driver to support my family. Others suffered the same fate, such as my friend Rachel Rooney, ridiculously attacked for ‘transphobia’ for her upbeat children’s book My Body Is Me.
The creator of Father Ted, Graham Linehan, has lost his marriage and career in the face of frenzied attacks by trans zealots because of his willingness to stand up for women’s rights. But it’s not just the targeted writers. The whole point of these mob ‘cancellations’ is to intimidate other writers into silence — and it works.
What makes this pattern all the more disgraceful is that the organisations that should be defending freedom are compliant in its erosion. That is particularly true of the Society Of Authors, whose recent record on standing up for embattled writers is appalling.
Its pusillanimity is typified by its chair, best-selling Chocolat author Joanne Harris.
Instead of battling for our rights, she seems only too eager to belittle the importance of liberty, as shown in an embarrassing tweet she sent in the wake of the Rushdie attack and a death threat to J.K.Rowling.
Launching a jokey online poll, she asked Society members ‘Have you ever received a death threat?’ and included the lines ‘Hell, yes’, and ‘Show me, dammit’.
Failure
Her insulting stance should not be a surprise, given that, under her leadership, the society has never issued an unequivocal statement in condemnation of Rowling’s lethal critics. Authors have now sent an open letter to the society, demanding that it finally take its failures seriously.
Nor was Harris forthright in her defence of writer Kate Clanchy, who was dropped by her publisher following a row over allegations of racism contained in her memoir about teaching in an inner-city school. It was the president of the society, author Philip Pullman, who was forced out in the wake of the Clanchy dispute, while Harris continued her reign of retreat.
Her failure to speak out against violent threats is typical of the cultural establishment, which has lost its sense of integrity. That is why a distinguished writer and philosopher such as Professor Kathleen Stock can be driven out of her post at Sussex University by trans supporters wearing balaclavas and issuing threats of intimidation.
The ideologues want propaganda and compliance, not art and exchange. As I found in my own career-ending dispute, they are censorious, judgmental and vicious, the very last people who should be dictating the nature of our culture. I can only hope that, amid the darkness, the attack on Rushdie and death threats to Rowling might act as a turning point.
Gillian Philip is an author and campaigner.