FOR REASONS that I will explain in a moment, I was recently inspired to read Salman Rushdie’s Knife, his memoir of the August 2022 attack that would nearly take his life and his remarkable recovery. There is a long, curious passage in the book that I want to quote here in full. The time is late 2022, after Rushdie’s triumphant return to his home in Manhattan ‘twelve weeks to the day since the attack’.
Rushdie writes (pp. 124-125):
‘There have been many times since the attack when I have thought that Death was hovering over the wrong people. Wasn’t I the one earmarked for collection by the Reaper, the one about whom everyone agreed that the odds were strongly against my surviving? And yet here I was, upright, well established in the recovery room, and turning back toward Life, while around me some of my closest friends were falling over. Bill Buford – former editor of Granta magazine, former fiction editor of the New Yorker, author of a book about British football (soccer) hooligans (Among the Thugs) and two books about, respectively, Italian and French food (Heat, Dirt), a man who had eaten too much rich food in his life and had long-term issues with his heart – passed out on a city sidewalk and actually briefly died. He was saved by a man who saw him fall, ran into his building, and came out with a defibrillator. What were the odds against that? And on the day after Christmas, my younger-brother-in-literature Hanif Kureishi passed out in Rome and when he regained consciousness, he couldn’t move his arms or his legs. He has been writing – or, rather, dictating – a beautifully brave, honest, and funny blog on Substack about his travails, and there is some improvement in his mobility, but at present it’s unclear when (or if) he will regain the use of his right, writing hand. And four days after I heard about Hanif, I learned that Paul Auster had lung cancer. Paul and his wife, Siri Hustvedt, had both participated in the event supporting me on the steps of the library, but now they were facing a crisis of their own. Paul had a chance of beating the cancer, he told me on the phone. One tumor, in one lung, not metastasized, not in the lymph nodes or anywhere else in his body, and he hoped the chemotherapy and immunotherapy could reduce its size drastically, and then the infected section of his lung could be surgically removed. So: fingers crossed.
And Martin was dying…’
Martin is the late novelist and essayist Martin Amis. As Rushdie recounts in the previous pages, Amis had been battling oesophageal cancer for years, but he appeared to have beaten the disease until the cancer, which had been in remission, returned. Following what was initially declared successful surgery, it would return again, and Amis died in May 2023. Despite Rushdie’s crossed fingers, Auster would also succumb, in April 2024.
What on earth was happening to Rushdie’s friends? Of course, there is no denying that Rushdie is a relative oldster: 75 at the time of the attack and 77 today. It is hardly surprising, then, that some friends of the same generation might be passing away.
However, the very point of the passage is that it was surprising: so many friends in such a short period of time, often under such mysterious circumstances. The deaths and near-misses and ailments were precisely sudden and unexpected. Here was Rushdie, who had been stabbed and slashed numerous times, including in the neck and the eye and the torso, and despite his terrible injuries, he was feeling increasingly fit; whereas his friends, who had appeared to be doing well, were dropping like flies. The ‘wrong people’ were dying, as Rushdie puts it.
Rushdie does not pause – perhaps does not dare – to ask why. The elephant in the room is, of course, that new thing that had been rolled out in December 2020 and of which his friends will presumably have had at least three doses by the time they were being diagnosed or re-diagnosed with cancer, briefly dropping dead in the middle of the street or suddenly collapsing and waking up paralysed.
Not surprisingly, given the period covered, Rushdie talks quite a lot about covid in his memoir. Indeed, he talks highly melodramatically about it, including about his own and his wife’s bouts with what he calls the ‘killer bug’ in March 2020, when the very first cases were being reported in New York. He does not say a single word about the covid ‘vaccines’.
Did Rushdie himself get the jab? Given how politically correct he is about virtually every other subject, and the ‘New York liberal’ milieu that he has made his own (in which the vaccination rate must have been approximately 100 per cent), it is hard to imagine him not having done so.
There is the intriguing passage where he writes, ‘I couldn’t go to London to see my family, nor could they travel to New York to see me, for two years – years that felt like centuries’ (p. 40). Why would he not have been able to travel between New York and London for two years? Transatlantic travel was reestablished in 2021, with considerable burdens, including quarantine, for the unvaccinated, but virtually none for the vaccinated.
On the other hand, he elsewhere (p. 43) says that he did indeed travel to London in September 2021 – which means that the two years ‘that felt like centuries’ would have been more like 18 months. Who knows?
Curious about the Hanif Kureishi incident, I had a glance at his Wikipedia page and was astonished, though I should not have been, to find his collapse in Rome described there as a ‘fall’. It is only in the last few years that passing out has been largely rebranded as ‘falling’ in public discourse; falling, previously the cause of many a broken bone, could just like that cause paralysis.
I was inspired to read Rushdie’s memoir by remarks he made on Elon Musk and X in a recent interview with the Spanish daily El País. ‘Elon Musk doesn’t defend free expression,’ Rushdie said, ‘his social network curates the discourse of the extreme-right. Appropriating a noble cause — such as freedom of expression — when what you really do is the opposite is very dishonest.‘
Hardly surprising that these remarks did not go viral on X! It is somewhat more surprising, however, given Rushdie’s status as free speech icon, that they were also largely ignored by free speech advocates, many of whom appear to have made their peace with ‘freedom of speech is not freedom of reach’.
Of course, Rushdie’s description of what exactly is being curated on X is nonsense. From the perspective of his New York and London literati circles, mainstream conservatives probably seem like ‘extremists’ and the tens of millions of Americans whose votes returned Donald Trump to the White House surely do – although none of them, needless to say, ever threatened, much less physically attacked Salman Rushdie on account of his opinions.
There is no question that discourse on X is indeed curated, algorithmically curated to promote certain voices and posts and to suppress others, and Rushdie is surely right that it is very dishonest to present such curated discourse as free speech.
Reading Knife, one cannot help but have the impression that Rushdie himself was only ever, so to say, an accidental free speech icon. He clearly wants to refute the accusation of ‘Islamophobia’ that has stuck to him since the publication of The Satanic Verses and that has been used, more generally, to suppress not just criticism of Islam as such but also of the real extremism, viz. Islamic extremism, that led his assailant not just to dislike or disagree with him, but to try to kill him.
Thus, he spends a large part of the imaginary dialogue that he has with the assailant in the book trying to prove that he has been misunderstood and that, even if himself irreligious, he is, if anything, an Islamophile. Rushdie cites a wide variety of evidence in his ‘defence’, noting that he has even portrayed jihadists ‘sympathetically’ (p. 158).
More to the immediate point, Rushdie has nothing whatsoever to say about the greatest assault on free speech in the history of the modern Western world: namely, the censorship of dissent in the context of the Covid-19 ‘response’ and, most notably, of not just opinion but brass-tacks information calling into question the efficacy and safety of the Covid-19 ‘vaccines’. Indeed, Rushdie even adopts the rhetoric of the censors, specifically targeting the very same big tech ‘giants’ that they did – YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – and bemoaning the realities of ‘our information age, for which “disinformation age” might be a more accurate name’ (p. 202).
Elsewhere in Knife, Rushdie refers eloquently to learning what he calls ‘the first lesson of free expression – that you must take it for granted.’ He continues, ‘If you are afraid of the consequences of what you say, then you are not free’ (pp. 98-99).
This is a good lesson to have learned, but judging from Knife, Rushdie is very careful about what he says. Is Salman Rushdie free? Fear comes in many forms. It may not just be the knife of the apprentice jihadist, but also the disapprobation of a publisher or the transatlantic cultural elites who have made Rushdie into a literary star. Likely, they would just as soon shun him as a disreputable kook should he so much as mention the elephant in the room.
