Read You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom for Free Online

Penguin bookshops and a department store. Police surrounded Penguin’s head office with concrete barricades to stop suicide bombers crashing cars into the building. They X-rayed all packages for explosives and patrolled the perimeter with guard dogs. Meanwhile Special Branch officers moved their charge from safe house to safe house. Rushdie was at the beginning of a rolling programme of house arrest that was to deprive him of his liberty for years.
    He had nowhere to run. If he had left Britain, no other country could have promised him safety. The global scale of the malice directed against him made him a refugee without the hope of asylum. Iranian or Pakistani writers who saw the violence in the West realised that if clerics issued fatwas against them in Tehran or Lahore, they could no longer expect to flee to a safe haven. If the controversy was raucous, if the media amplified the death threats, there would be nowhere on the planet to hide.
    To justify their death threats and make the shocking seem reasonable, Rushdie’s enemies aped the European fascists and communists of the twentieth century. Just as the Nazis said that the Germans were the victims of supernatural Jewish plots or the communists said that the proletariat was the target of the machinations of the treacherous bourgeoisie, so the Islamists told the faithful that they were being persecuted by a conspiracy of global reach and occult power. Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, declared that the West had been engaged in a cultural war from colonialism on to ‘undermine the people’s genuine Islamic morals’. Rushdie was at its forefront. He was the ideal undercover agent for Western intelligence, Rafsanjani announced – ‘a person who seemingly comes from India and who apparently is separate from the Western world and who has a misleading name’. Rushdie was a white colonialist, hiding beneath a brown skin; a traitor hiding behind a Muslim name. The British secret service had paid him to betray the faithful, the Iranian theocracy explained as it added corruption to the list of charges against him. It gave him bribes, disguised as book advances, as it organised the assault on Islam by the cunning if curious means of a magical realist novel.
    As with Nazism, the conspiracy theory needed Jews. The Iranian interior minister said that Zionists had ‘direct involvement’ in publishing the book. The Iranian president said that ‘Zionist-controlled news agencies’ had made Rushdie famous. In Syria, the Ba’athist dictatorship said that the novel was part of a plot to distract the world’s attention from Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. In Pakistan, religious leaders talked of an ‘American Jewish conspiracy’. Across the planet, the drums shuddered to the same beat: ‘It’s the Jews, it’s the Jews, it’s the Jews.’
    The demonstrations against Rushdie were not confined to the poor world. The faithful marched in Bradford and London as well as Tehran and Lahore. They inspired a fear in the West that went almost unnoticed during the elation the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe produced.
    Fear was a novel emotion for Western liberals, and I understand why they wanted to push it to the back of their minds. However much they talked about the bravery of the stands they were making, those in the West who campaigned against apartheid in southern Africa, and those, much fewer in number, who wanted to help the opponents of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, had not had to put their lives on the line. They had not had to come to terms with the knowledge that the publication of a book or a cartoon, or the vigorous condemnation of an oppressive ideology, would place families, colleagues and themselves in danger. They had never felt the need to glance twice at dark doorways or listen for quickening footsteps coming up behind them in the street.
    By the early 1990s, events seemed to have taught liberals that they