OUR OWN AYATOLLAHS
MEMO from the Editor Our Own Ayatollahs What a great and salubrious wave of righteous indignation washed across our land in response to the anathema pronounced against author Salman Rushdie by the...
...Ask the State Department about the foreign scholars who are not allowed to propound their dissident views on U.S...
...It was not only denounced from the pulpits as a piece of blasphemy...
...To be sure, no one put out a contract on Martin Scorsese—but I suspect the reason wasn't a lack of will but the absence of opportunity to carry out the threat...
...Op-ed scribes and editorial cartoonists, pundits and polemicists of sundry persuasions all found common ground in denouncing the Ayatollah's despicable attack on The Satanic Verses and its author...
...Last year, police and Chicago politicians stormed the art school at the Art Institute of Chicago to seize a student painting that assailed the dignity of the late Mayor Harold Washington...
...We could safely assume, here in the enlightened West, here in America, that neither church nor state would dare intrude upon the liberty of writers and readers...
...Because of an equipment failure at the shop that prepares The Progressive for mailing to subscribers, address labels were improperly affixed to some copies of the February issue...
...We will not tolerate that picture hanging on the wall, Constitution or no Constitution," declaimed Alderman Allen Streeter, who surely ought to apply for the next vacancy on Ayatollah Khomeini's staff...
...The first of them appears on Page 16 of this issue...
...And about the Los Angeles discjockeys who publicly burned record albums of folk-rock singer Cat Stevens last month because he had the temerity to defend Ayatollah Khomeini...
...Information Agency about the documentary films it has tried to keep out of circulation in this country and abroad...
...Suddenly, there was no lack of valiant champions of the freedom to write, to publish, to read, without being subjected to threats of violent death, bodily harm, or damage to property...
...And about the self-styled feminists who waxed ecstatic as they regaled their friends with an account of how they had wrecked a bookstore that sold stuff they didn't like...
...Address your request to Publisher Ruth Greenspan, The Progressive, 409 East Main Street, Madison, WI 53703...
...so far beyond comprehension...
...The White House, Capitol Hill, even Foggy Bottom resonated with admirable rhetoric about the sanctity of free speech and untrammeled expression...
...The Postal Service tells us that an undetermined number of magazines could not be delivered because the labels fell off...
...Ask the U.S...
...We're pleased to announce that she has agreed to write four columns a year, under the heading "Outsider," for The Progressive...
...Only a few months ago, here in America, a film called The Last Temptation of Christ touched off an uproar...
...There's more than one way to suppress blasphemy...
...Ask Noam Chomsky about the treatment his books have received—or failed to receive—from the same media that have risen so nobly to the defense of The Satanic Verses...
...For several years now, Diana Johnstone's brilliant reporting and analysis have enlightened readers of various publications, including In These Times, which she serves as European editor...
...MEMO from the Editor Our Own Ayatollahs What a great and salubrious wave of righteous indignation washed across our land in response to the anathema pronounced against author Salman Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini...
...If you were supposed to receive the February issue but didn't, we'll send a free replacement copy while our supply lasts...
...some movie houses showing it were vandalized, their patrons were badgered and harassed, and many theater owners were dissuaded from booking the film...
...Ask the members of Congress who voted to shut down PLO offices...
...And it was a despicable attack that richly deserved to be denounced...
...flag was presented in another student's work...
...We have lots of ayatollahs of our own...
...And before we on the Left become too smug about our commitment to free speech, think about the young man—a self-styled socialist—who told me, "The only answer to Nazi speech is a lead pipe to the skull...
...The price placed on Salman Rushdie's head was something alien—a Third World phenomenon, an Islamic thing, the product, as Jonathan Yardley wrote in The Washington Post, of "a culture whose rules are so different from our own...
...But something else lurked just beneath the surface—a smug, self-congratulatory sense that we, after all, are above that sort of thing...
...Is that a fact...
...And just a few weeks ago, even as the Rushdie case preoccupied the mass media, patriotic veterans in Chicago vowed to press for an end to funding of the same art school because they didn't like the way the U.S...
...campuses...
Vol. 53 • April 1989 • No. 4
