Cultural Assassins

Christopher Hitchens writes at Vanity Fair on the impact of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie on Western society as a whole:-

When Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on novelist Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, it was the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom. Two decades later, the violence continues, and Muslim fundamentalists have gained a new advantage: media self-censorship

Later in this interesting and relevant article :-

We live now in a climate where every publisher and editor and politician has to weigh in advance the possibility of violent Muslim reprisal. In consequence, there are a number of things that have not happened. Let me give a recent and trivial example that isn’t altogether lacking in symbolic importance. Last October, Sony PlayStation abruptly delayed the release of its biggest video game in 2008, LittleBigPlanet, because an accompanying track by the Malian singer Toumani Diabaté included two expressions that, according to the Press Association report, “can be found in the Koran.” Following the lead of the American press—which refused to show its readers the Danish cartoons and thus permit them to judge for themselves—the report did not care to say which “expressions” these were. It was a textbook instance of self-censorship or, if you prefer, of crying before you are hurt. There was one American magazine (the secular Free Inquiry, for which I write) that did print those Danish cartoons—Borders Books pulled that issue from the shelves.

Further on Hitchens comments:-

So there is now a hidden partner in our cultural and academic and publishing and broadcasting world: a shadowy figure that has, uninvited, drawn up a chair to the table. He never speaks. He doesn’t have to. But he is very well understood. The late playwright Simon Gray was alluding to him when he said that Nicholas Hytner, the head of London’s National Theatre, might put on a play mocking Christianity but never one that questioned Islam.

Please read the entire piece, as although some of the flavour is in the extracts the whole is worth reading.

Adam is of the view that Hitchens is right, we have now become so culturally sensitive that we hesitate to take positions in case we offend someone.

This is the case in NZ as much as anywhere else. Adam would perhaps go further than Hitchens and suggest that it is not just the media, but throughout society we see this, as in the desire to remove any overt signs of Christian festivals for fear of offending people. Along with any other expressions of upholding Western values.

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