Start Date: January 18, 2024

For starters, as of this writing, no, Salman Rushdie is not dead.

But on September 12, 2012 there was an attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya that resulted in the deaths of Americans, including the ambassador Christopher Stevens. If you were an adult at a the time you surely heard of this, perhaps too much and yet perhaps too little. The debate was roughly speaking about: who, when and why.

The administration of then President Barak Obama put forth a rather odd tale that it was all due to a clip on YouTube of a trailer of some esoteric movie that the NSA might be hard pressed to find. They suggested that this caused a spontaneous eruption of outrage among Muslims and that the protesters were immediately prepared to conduct a several hour attack on multiple facilities with rocket and mortar fire. President Obama was quick to assert his intentions to prosecute whomever committed the heinous crime, meaning the producer of the movie?

I find it less than credible that, on the anniversary of 9-11, Al Quaeda stumbled onto a movie clip and then “like-ed” it on their Facebook pages so that they could share it with all their crew and tweet plans to meet at the compound.

But if you insist that is the case, then let’s just set it aside. Presume the whole bloody massacre was just an out-of-scale movie review. Here’s the catch. Historically, western democracy, a least the United States, has had a value known as “freedom of speech.” It is the first amendment of our Constitution. You are actually allowed to make movies that offend people. In fact I would estimate that most movies ever made offend me on some level, either by sexism, stupidity, or just the money spent. I am probably offended by something every day, but have yet to blow up anyone. Many Christians have been deeply offended by disrespectful art exhibits that were sponsored in part by the government and told, to some effect, “get over it”.

A few decades ago the Ayatollah of Iran ordered a fatwa on the author Salman Rushdie for a book known as “Satanic Verses.” I highly suspect that the Ayatollah did not actually read the book. But it may have been suggested that it would make a useful distraction from his country’s vast social and economic ills.

At that time, and since, numerous people have risked their lived to defend the right of Mr. Rushdie to write something that may be offensive to Muslims. I have never read it so I will leave it to others as to whether it is in good taste. However, if you wish to suggest that a higher level of art is the reason his work is defended, while the Obama administration wished to persecute an online video producer, that simply isn’t the way the Constitution works. If the right to free speech were prorated by the quality of speech it would be fair to say that Saturday Night Live would never have happened.

So I found myself imagining that when the Benghazi hearings were completed it would be determined that the American Ambassador to Libya was killed by Salman Rushdie and he would have to be prosecuted for a hate crime. Except I think he, Mr. Rushdie, is of Indian descent and thus a non-white minority. So what to do?

P.S. As indicated above, I began this draft a decade ago. Two years ago, in 2022, Salman Rushdie was preparing to give a speech at the Chautauqua Institute about the U.S. being a safe space for writers. A young Muslim launched a near fatal attack, stabbing him in the face and leaving him partially blind. The assailant was arrested but has yet to be tried. If he holds out long enough he can probably have his charges waived and his crime be deemed self defense.