On Friday, August 12, a 24-year-old New Jersey resident by the name of Hadi Matar stormed the stage in western New York where the Anglo-Indian author Salman Rushdie was scheduled to speak and stabbed him 15 times before he was subdued by a security guard and members of the audience.1 The assault was immediately labeled “an assault on freedom of thought and speech”2 and Rushdie was praised as “an inspirational defender of persecuted writers and journalists across the world.”3

Missing from news accounts was the role which Rushdie played as an agent provocateur in a campaign designed to provoke violent responses from the Islamic world, which would be then turned around to demonize that Islamic world. No one would know who Salman Rushdie was if he hadn’t written The Satanic Verses as the inauguration of an ongoing assault on Muslim culture which has continued to this day and has been revived by Matar’s assault for further weaponization.

The Satanic Verses paved the way for the Danish cartoon crisis which unfolded on September 30, 2005, after the Danish periodical Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons ridiculing the prophet Muhammad.4 Then as now the assault on Islamic sensibilities was justified in the name of “freedom of thought and speech.” But in the light of subsequent events it became clear that the point of these intentionally reckless and provocative acts was the Islamic reaction, which included protests around the world, “including violence and riots in some Muslim countries.”5

In September 2012, the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, aping Jyllands-Posten, published a series of cartoons which were deliberately calculated to offend the sensibilities of Muslims, including a cartoon which “depicted Muhammad as a nude man on all fours with a star covering his anus.”6 What followed was so predictable that one had to conclude that provoking violent reaction was part of the plan from the beginning. On January 7, 2015, two Muslim gunmen forced their way into the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo and opened fire, killing twelve staff members and wounding 11. During the attack, the gunmen shouted Allahu Akbar and “The Prophet is avenged.” Eager to cash in on the unprecedented publicity the attack afforded them, the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo upped the print run for the following week’s edition from 60,000 to one million, then to three million, and then to five million copies.

Eventually, every European head of state showed up at a march sporting “Je suis Charlie” buttons celebrating what was a deliberate attempt to provoke violence for political ends. Since then, ridicule of Islamic culture has become institutionalized not only in journalistic outlets but on Internet platforms like Twitter, whose seemingly innocent entry #hijab is actually a portal to hardcore pornography depicting women wearing the hijab but otherwise naked engaging in various forms of perverted sexual activity. Twitter also has an entry #Mitpachat, which is the name for the orthodox Jewish head covering for women that is equivalent to the hijab, but no porn is allowed on this site. As anyone familiar with the Israelis’ use of pornography against Palestinians in Ramallah in 2004 already knows, pornography is a weapon which, like blasphemous cartoons, is itself a form of violence and often creates violence.

Journalism played a crucial role in this psychological warfare campaign against Islam. Nothing epitomized the wretched state of journalism in the U.K. and the U.S. better than the recent article by Stephen Pollard in the Telegraph condemning the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. “Stephen Pollard,” according to one observer, “is a rabid Zionist, an unprincipled propagandist and liar,” but nevertheless in good standing with the British media and Establishment, despite the many rulings against the Jewish Chronicle, which he edits. Pollard has written for all of Britain’s mainstream media outlets, including the Evening Standard, the Daily Express, The Times, the Daily Mail, The Independent, and the Sunday Telegraph in spite of the risk of libel suits against any newspaper which hires him as a writer.

In September 2010, the Spectator had to pay damages and costs to the organizers of the Islam Expo resulting from a defamation case involving a blog post written by Pollard and published in July 2008. During his tenure as editor of the Jewish Chronicle, the Press Complaints Commission handed down 14 rulings against the paper forcing it to pay damages for libel on several occasions throughout his tenure. The effect those damages had on the paper’s bottom line became apparent in April 2020 when the Jewish Chronicle announced that it was going into voluntary liquidation despite a planned merger with the Jewish News because of Pollard’s reckless disregard of the truth. In spite of this dismal journalistic track record, Pollard is still the go to guy when the mainstream media want opinions on topics vital to Jewish interests, which is how he sees the Rushdie affair.

Pollard claims that “Tehran never rescinded the fatwa against Sir Salman Rushdie” because “It’s incapable of change.”7 Pollard ends his article by claiming that “the fatwa on Sir Salman Rushdie is not an aberration. It is how this monstrous criminal regime operates.”8

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken claimed that Iran had been inciting violence, ignoring the fact that the Iranian government denied any involvement with the man who attempted to kill Rushdie.9 The same government spokesman who denied any involvement between Iran and Matar added that “Freedom of speech does not justify Salman Rushdie’s insults on religion.” The fatwa has never formally been rescinded.

As someone who has earned his living by writing for over 40 years, I can sincerely say that no writer should be condemned to death in absentia for something that he has written. As a writer, I am against fatwas of this sort, but I mean all fatwas even if they do not go by that name. This includes Jewish fatwas of the sort issued by Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which have been given carte blanche to confer the equivalent of the death sentence on anyone by denouncing their enemies as Nazis and anti-Semites. This is precisely what happened to the Canadian trucker protest when Ya’ara Sachs, a member of the Canadian parliament, told the world that “Honk Honk” equals “Heil Hitler.” As soon as she stripped the truckers of their real identity, Finance Minister Christia Freeland was able to freeze their bank accounts in an act of violence that was more effective in silencing freedom of speech than anything that Hadi Matar did to Sir Salman.

[…] This is just an excerpt from the September 2022 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)