Excerpt:
In 1989, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of British writer Salman Rushdie in retaliation for his writing a book that depicted Islam in a negative light. Since then, according to veteran journalist Paul Berman, Rushdie "has metastasized into an entire social class" – a continually growing group of intellectuals from Muslim backgrounds who live under threat of violence because they have criticized Islamism.
These people (many of whom live in Western democracies) "survive only because of bodyguards and police investigations and because of their own precautions," Berman writes in his new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals. "Fear - mortal fear, the fear of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip of a bizarre ideology - has become, for a significant number of intellectuals and artists, a simple fact of modern life."
But there is one important, glaring difference: Twenty years ago, the liberal intelligentsia in Europe and the United States rallied around Rushdie and denounced the murder threat. That took real courage. One of Rushdie's translators was murdered and another stabbed. Several Norwegian bookstores were bombed, a British hotel was attacked by a suicide bomber, and more than 50 people were killed in anti-Rushdie rioting around the world.