OF MICE AND MAHAGONNY AND SIR SALMAN RUSHDIE
    On Valentine’s Day, 1989, the terror-loving regime of the late and unlamented Ayatollah Khomeini took a considerable gamble. What if, they reasoned, we select some unsuspecting public person who is not a citizen of our state – who is a citizen of a Western democracy – and declare, to all who listen, that we intend to kill this person for alleged crimes against our faith? What will the democracies do? Will they do anything?
Salman Rushdie is the canary shoved down the mine of state-sponsored terrorism. Thankfully, he isn’t dead – but if it weren’t for Great Britain’s Special Branch and the author’s own deep pockets, he might well be. America yawned, Britain raked him in the tabloids, and nobody, in short, gave a damn. The Ayatollah’s experiment worked. Now Tehran’s theocrats deny the Holocaust and speak wistfully of a world without America. What have we done? Have we done anything?
We have done something.  We have utterly failed – and the Bush administration, hobbled by political correctness, must take some responsibility for this – to connect the obvious dots that link Iran to a whole laundry list of horrors, most recently Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Iraqi Shia “rebellion.” We have also failed –not demonstrated to the public with consistency and clarity – to place this hideous grouping within the larger context of global Islamism. Who threw Holocaust survivor Leon Klinghofer, and his wheelchair, off the deck of the Achille Lauro back in 1985? Who downed the plane over Lockerbie? Who puts ammo and camo on babies? Who was arrested in Buffalo and in Fort Dix? Who sends their ghoulish missionaries into our prison system, where they peddle violence to those already used to it – a pre-sold audience, as it were?
Rushdie himself said it best, in an op-ed piece shortly after 9/11 titled, “Yes, It Is About Islam.”  
    They always come for artists first. The Nazis let white mice loose in the theater where Bertold Brecht’s “Mahagonny” played (I heard this from my father, a German refugee). I read The Satanic Verses; it’s as good as Joyce or Nabokov, and much better than most Thomas Pynchon. How could any human being want to kill another such over a dream sequence? Or was it the part about the ayatollah-like character flushing the toilet that inflamed the faithful? Rushdie called Mrs. Thatcher “Mrs. Torture” and “Maggie the b*tch.” His characters put her wax effigy into a microwave and chanted, “Burn, Maggie, burn.” The English are derided as “cold fish,” whose climate makes it impossible for them to differentiate day from night and good from evil. Considerable harumphing and spluttering ensued, but look what happened in the end. The man’s alive, and knighted.  The English may be cold indeed, but, like God in the Depeche Mode song, they do have a sense of humor.   
    I’m looking for alpha atheist Christopher Hitchens to come to the defense of his old friend. Religion – one religion, at least – is ruining everything. We need to spread the bad, the awful news: have you heard? They want us dead. Otherwise, before too long, there might be mice beneath your feet.