Who Will Speak For Rushdie?

With Muslim extremists demanding blood in exchange for Salman Rushdie’s pending knighthood, Tim Rutten wonders why there have been so few voices in the West defending Rushdie? “What masquerades as tolerance and cultural sensitivity among many U.S. journalists is really a kind of soft bigotry, an unspoken assumption that Muslim societies will naturally repress great writers and murder honest journalists, and that to insist otherwise is somehow intolerant or insensitive.”