In hindsight, the British should have seen it coming long ago. It is almost 20 years since Salman Rushdie first published The Satanic Verses, an event that brought into full public glare the undercurrents of zealotry at work among some of Britain's Muslims.Not Western societies. Liberal governments. Liberal thinkers. And the only reason liberals may rethink multiculturalism is because they can no longer ignore what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. warned them about more than a dozen years ago. And that's only because they can no longer get away with selling out their country and their country's core values for political gain.
In a land where, two centuries earlier, Voltaire had sought calm refuge from the religious bigotry of Europe, Rushdie was accused of blasphemy by Islamists and a fatwa was issued by the mullahs in Iran.
This was an affront to every precept of Western liberal thinking.
Rushdie was subsequently forced into hiding, protected by British secret security services. In 1991, the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was stabbed to death. In 1993, the Norwegian publisher of the book suffered gunshot wounds.
Was anyone prosecuted for inciting violence against Rushdie and his publishers? No. Governments reacted with forbearance. This was not only wrong in principle, but it gave a lot of people the wrong idea about the willingness of Western societies to defend their core values.
In the end, the proof of the poverty of values of Liberalism were the London terrorist attacks. No accomodation with oil, no indifference to muslim extremism that has racked Africa as hundreds of thousands of Africans died as radical Islam waged war against moderation, no open borders to accept dissaffected muslim youth to ease pressures at home, no policy of neglect to assimilate made a difference. It all turned out exactly how Schlesinger predicted. With so much advance warning from so preeminent a Liberal, did they expect anything else? Indeed, the question might be: Did they want anything else?
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