Defenders of Sally Rooney are now comparing her to Salman Rushdie. Tom Slater at the Spectator:
The New Statesman (NS) has published an open letter railing against the ‘censorship’ of Rooney ‘on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti-terror legislation’. It is signed by ‘leading authors, artists and public figures’, which apparently includes Kneecap, those Irish rappers who wave Hezbollah flags on stage, and Jolyon Maugham, the patron saint of mad, lost causes. To go alongside it, NS culture editor Tanjil Rashid has penned a – frankly – risible piece arguing Rushdie and Rooney now have more in common than their initials, because both have seen their novels pulled from the shelves.
Where to start with this? I must have missed the bit where an Islamist tyrant called on Muslims the world over to murder Rooney, as Ayatollah Khomeini did to Rushdie in 1989 when he declared The Satanic Verses ‘blasphemous’. I must have missed the protests, from Bolton to Bombay, where Rooney’s books and likeness were burned by baying mobs. Rooney’s publishers may no longer be selling her paperbacks to Daunt Books, but I don’t think their employees have to live in fear of being shot, stabbed or killed – as happened to Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher, his Italian and his Japanese translators respectively. Rushdie himself lost the sight in one eye and the use of one hand after an Islamic Republic fanboy stabbed him on stage in New York in 2022: a fate that Rooney – Inshallah – is unlikely to suffer at the hands of those dastardly Zionists.
‘The circumstances of the withdrawal of books by either author have in each case their nuances’, concedes Rashid, ‘the causes and consequences are different’. You think? Rushdie’s books were pulled from sale because retailers feared they would be firebombed. Rooney pulled her own books from sale because she wished to continue to fund a group that has been attacking RAF bases, breaking into Israeli defence firms and swinging sledgehammers into the spines of police officers as it goes. These cases are not separated by ‘nuance’ – these are entirely different things….
Sally Rooney is not a terrorist. On this, Jolyon and I agree. But she is not a free-speech heroine, either. She certainly shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as an author who almost paid the ultimate price for hurting the precious feelings of Islamic zealots. The bigger scandal here is not that Normal People cannot be bought in Britain today, it’s that another book like The Satanic Verses would never be published in Britain today. I look forward to the literati taking that one up.
They won’t, of course.
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