my Reaction to the Salman Rushdie Attack

You know, if you were to see a, say, a television commercial thirty years from now, and in that commercial, Carol Burnett shanks Saul Goodman in prison, then your reaction to that would be kind of similar to my reaction to the news of the attack on Salman Rushdie in New York. Like, I thought that story was over already, all the characters had moved on to other things or died off. I mean, attacking Salman Rushdie is like something from a time capsule. It's an anachronism in 2022. I know I'm making light of it, but frankly, there's thousands of miles of priorities between my mind and Salman Rushdie, and there always have been.

I never read the satanic verses. I have only seen enough interviews and speeches by him to be unimpressed. He is a mediocre writer and an even less competent thinker in my opinion. I mean, Khomeini basically acted as his publicist in 1989 and saved his career from obscurity with his assassination fatwa. It was a fatwa issued by someone who has a skewed understanding of Islam targeting someone who has a skewed understanding of Islam, only taken seriously by people who have a skewed understanding of Islam, and eventually carried out by someone with a similarly deranged mentality.

Now I can say that in my admittedly limited exposure to Salman Rushdie's views, I didn't really find him to be virulently anti Islamic. There are certainly much more aggressive Islamophobic propagandists out there. And I have heard him trying to explain that his book, The Satanic Verses, was never intended to be blasphemous and so on. To me, Salman Rushdie is a standard issue, pompous, intellectual lightweight who cashed in on the notoriety of being hated by Muslims, most of whom knew nothing about him. Now, it's pretty awful to get stabbed.

That's a terrible thing that happened, but the bright side is I'm sure he will cash in on that too, and he will enjoy the momentary, anyway, revival of his relevance, which, let's be honest, has been waning for decades. I know I'm supposed to condemn the attack on Salman Rushdie and declare the innocence of all the Muslims from that crime, but I don't really see Christians, Jews, Hindus, atheists condemning anti Muslim acts of violence and declaring the innocence of their communities from those acts of violence even though they have figures in their communities that dehumanize and incite hatred against Muslims daily. The incident with Salman Rushdie to me is like some sort of latter day follower of Charles Manson attacking someone long after the Manson family disbanded. Just some deranged guy who's wanting to carry out the orders of a long dead cult leader. It's weird and ugly and senseless, but weird ugly senseless things happen all the time, particularly in a country with the highest number of mass shootings in the world and three times as many serial killers as any other country on earth.

I can't really muster much more of a reaction to it than that. I don't think it's particularly important incident. It's unfortunate for him and his family, but that kind of thing happens all the time.