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Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeni was the architect of the Iranian revolution and the guiding spirit of the Iranian regime that has held sway since 1979. He was the regime’s Supreme Leader. Ayatollah Ali Khameni is his successor.
Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988. A few months later, on February 14, 1989, Khomeni issued a fatwa proclaiming a death sentence on Rushdie “and all those involved in [the] publication [of the novel] who were aware of its content.”
As everyone knows, Rushdie lived in hiding for years. His memoir Joseph Anton (2013) recounts the devastating impact of Khomeni’s fatwa on his life. Benjamin Balint’s excellent Claremont Review of Books review is not accessible at the moment, but our friends at the CRB are working on it.
In the wake of Khomeni’s fatwa, and understanding its significance, Daniel Pipes immediately set to work on The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, The Ayatollah, and the West (1990). Referring to “Khomeni and his ilk,” Pipes concludes the book with these words: “The West has to make it clear that the fundamentalist Muslims will gain nothing through threats and intimidation.”
A funny thing happened on its way to publication by Basic Books. Basic Books canceled its contract with Pipes and let him keep the advance. Pipes includes Edwin McDowell’s brief New York Times Book Notes story on the cancelation in an appendix.
The long arm of Khomeni’s fatwa reached out to strike Rushdie down before his talk lauding free speech at the Chautauqua Institution in New York yesterday. Today comes news that Rushdie is severely injured and on a ventilator. The AP story on the events is posted here.
The perpetrator was immediately apprehended. See Michael Doran’s tweet on the perpetrator below.
It is a humiliating and appalling abomination that this attack occurred on American soil. What is to be done? Doran reasonably anticipates the worst from Joe Biden’s clown-car administration.
The violent bear it away. That title of Flannery O’Connor’s 1960 novel still resonates. Some relentless atavism is at work in our culture, a monstrous irrationality that awakens what O’Connor called “the stuff of which madmen and fanatics are made.” Violence, no longer shunned, is now an accepted political tool.
The attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh—preceded by U.S Attorney General Merrick Garland’s refusal to enforce federal law against protesters at justices’ homes—exposed the fragile divide between constituted order and willed anarchy. In effect, the attorney general’s inaction acquiesced to mob intimidation and signaled a willingness to risk further lawlessness.
The descent into Third World-like threats against the judiciary did not come suddenly. The slouch toward selective law enforcement and politicized violence has a history. By whatever name we call it—wokeism nowadays—adversary culture has been loosening essential restraints for some six decades. Like the lifecycle of a parasite, the passion for repudiating established order mutates and reappears in successive stages. Today’s recurrence of the New Left virus keeps the inherited infection alive in a new generation of hosts.
A Hatred ‘Like a Cleansing Flame’
A sizable portion of the American electorate has never heard of the New Left, of which they are heirs. For many, weaned on Apple News and Yahoo headlines, history began with Facebook or an Instagram account.
The smartphone generation draws a blank on the name Todd Gitlin, a prominent 1960s activist, president of Students for a Democratic Society, and cultural historian. An eventual critic of the movement he inhabited, Gitlin anticipated the corrosive power of identity politics, racial jockeying, multiculturalism, and political correctness. He wrote: “You can hate your country in such a way that the hatred becomes fundamental. A hatred so clear and intense came to feel like a cleansing flame. By the late 60s, this is what became of the New Left.”
The animus remains. Left zealots are still dedicated to a holy cause. All that changed were the objects of fanatical grievance. Abortion and climate change now head the list, followed by ever-mutating racial and sexual resentments.
By Any Means Necessary
On July 7, the fifth anniversary of the ball field shooting of GOP Whip Steve Scalise and four others, a climate activist group called Now or Never vowed to shut down this year’s game on July 28. (Thanks to Sens. Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer, they did not need to.) Demanding “billions of dollars in clean energy investment,” the group’s website promised more “climate action” to save the planet: “Conventional means no longer apply. … It is time to escalate. … It’s time to leave everything on the field.”
That playing field analogy translates to “by any means necessary,” a call to arms taken from a speech on terrorism by Franz Fanon in 1960. A black Marxist born in Martinique, Fanon joined the FLN during the Algerian War. His seminal text, “The Wretched of the Earth”(1961), became the left’s manual for lethal insurgency.
Only revolutionary terrorism could transform “a whole social structure … from the bottom up.” Assent to violence was a prerequisite. “At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force,” Fanon wrote in 1963.
New Targets for Violence
After the war, the taste for revolution redefined its target and its market. In the post-colonial era, totems of decolonization shifted to new applicants for victimhood.
Ideologues of feminism and post-colonialism shared an epiphany: Colonization is not limited to historic events. It is an ongoing process. Accordingly, the anti-colonial struggle expanded to radical feminism, environmentalism, LBGT-ism, transgenderism, and the spreading epidemic of claims by pressure groups gripped by identity politics.
In consequence, newly discovered conceptual colonies multiply. Only the colonizer remains the same. Each imagined territory—from “coloniality of gender” to colonized mathematics with its “marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges”—demands rites of expiation from the white heteronormative patriarchy.
Attack White Men
Whiteness itself has become the tincture of systemic oppression. Psychology Today, a useful guide to the zeitgeist, began its “Journey Into Whiteness” in 2009. It has wrung its hands over the hegemonic white psyche ever since. A recent headline ran: “The Dobbs Decision is Deeply Rooted in the Patriarchy.”
White Western patriarchy, its norms and institutions, is today’s all-purpose bogey. Impassioned Greens can justify terror on the perception that “climate change is violence.” How so? Because it worsens inequalities created by an imperialist, white supremacist patriarchy. Just days ago, Nature alerted readers to the danger of climate change driving violence against women and “gender minorities.” Theorizers of post-colonial feminism deem colonization itself “a gendered act.”
Current terms for achieving gender and racial equity fulfill Fanon’s definition of decolonization: “[It is] quite simply, the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another species of men.” And it is “always a violent phenomenon.” His theorizing is the fulcrum on which wokeism turns. “If the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a massive and decisive struggle…”
The Woke Believe Violence Is Justified
The summer of 2020 tutored us in that struggle. It carried a warning: Violence in an ideologically acceptable cause does not occasion moral revulsion among the woke. That lesson was repeated by the post-Dobbs firebombing of crisis pregnancy centers and law enforcement’s subsequent shrug over organizations that declared themselves “at war” with pro-life activity.
In “Notes on Nationalism” (1945) George Orwell wrote that the key to political judgments—who is guilty? who is the victim?—is apt to lie in the identities of the parties involved instead of in the nature of the wrongdoing: “Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage … which does not change its moral when it is committed by ‘our side.’”
His comment was a counter ahead of time to Jean-Paul Sartre’s glorification of “Wretched of the Earth.” In his preface to Fanon’s text, Sartre spoke for the revolutionary side: “No gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them.” He made a romance of it: “irrepressible violence” against a perceived enemy is “man recreating himself.”
That siren call was not lost on the organizers of Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in 2020. They named themselves after the Algiers Autonomous Zone (ZAA). Launched by the FLN in 1956, it was the center of FLN’s guerrilla network.
Seattle’s shanty tribute to “The Battle of Algiers”—Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 documentary guide to tactical insurrection—was more than burlesque. It was a forecast.
As a torched pregnancy center reopened near Buffalo, New York, on Monday, leaders vowed to continue their work and criticized authorities for a slow-walking investigation and even appearing to condone the attack.
Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) told the crowd she had introduced the Pregnancy Resource Center Defense Act to increase prison terms and fines for attacks on anti-abortion centers like the CompassCare Pregnancy Services.
The fire that damaged the center began around 2:30 a.m. on June 7. Police have not yet announced the cause as arson nor arrested anyone.
The center’s director, Rev. Jim Harden, said their security cameras captured video of multiple attackers with multiple incendiary devices, probably Molotov cocktails. Police confiscated the security camera footage, and the center can’t get at it, Harden said.
Damage at the CompassCare pregnancy center in Amherst, N.Y. Its windows were shattered and fires set inside early on June 7, 2022. Spray-painted on one wall was the message “Jane was here.” An pro-abortion group called Jane’s Revenge took credit for the attack. (Dan Berger/The Epoch Times)
The graffiti “Jane was here” was scrawled on the side of the building, and a pro-abortion group called Jane’s Revenge took credit for the firebombing afterward. It was one of numerous such attacks on such centers, which offer counseling, care, and support to pregnant women to persuade them to keep their babies.
Tenney, Harden, and New York State Sen. George Borrello expressed contempt for the state’s official response to the incident, which Harden said caused $250,000 in damage and another $150,000 in increased security costs.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, they said, responded to the incident by moving to investigate, not Jane’s Revenge, but the centers themselves. She termed pro-lifers “Neanderthals” less than two weeks after the attack. State Attorney General Letitia James demanded Google take the pregnancy centers off their maps, Harden said.
60 Similar Incidents
Nearly 60 anti-abortion pregnancy centers and churches have been attacked nationally in the last few months, according to the Boston Globe, including attacks in Longmont, Colorado; Anchorage, Alaska; Portland, Oregon; and Madison, Wisconsin.
At the Longmont clinic, the perpetrators scrawled “if abortions aren’t safe, neither are you” on the walls of the building they set on fire. The violence began after the leak of the Supreme Court’s impending Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
The police department of the Town of Amherst, where the CompassCare Pregnancy Services center sits, declined to attend the reopening event and issued a brief statement saying they continue to investigate in conjunction with the FBI and other agencies. Efforts to reach the Town of Amherst Police Department and the FBI’s Buffalo field office for comment were unsuccessful.
The agencies have released virtually no information about their investigation, Harden said. “We’re very frustrated with how long this is taking. It’s Day 55. This is inexcusable.”
“This is the pro-abortion Kristallnacht,” he said. He defended his bold comparison of this wave of violence to that unleashed against German Jews by the Nazis in November 1938. Common to both events, he said, was a lack of public outcry and a refusal by political leaders to criminalize it and go after the perpetrators.
“They turned around and said you deserve this … They sent a message that violence is okay if it supports their political agenda,” said State Sen. George Borrello, the only state legislator to attend the event today. “It’s worse than silence.”
“Jane’s Revenge is emboldened by the inaction of our governor, our attorney general, and our majority Democrat Legislature.”
The state’s controversial Bail Reform Act means that the perpetrators, if caught, will probably be released without bail. “Someone has to die before the progressives think it’s violence,” Borrello said.
Mother or Baby
Tension over abortion started increasing in the state long before the recent Dobbs decision. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo pushed through a bill in 2019 making abortion a fundamental human right, Harden said. That means, according to New York law, any medical practitioner who won’t refer a woman for an abortion violates the pregnant’s civil rights.
CompassCare opened its Buffalo-area center in 2019. It saw about 1,100 patients last year and expects to see 1,600 this year. The attack didn’t stop their work. They saw patients right after the attack at their Rochester area clinic and quickly found an undisclosed location in the Buffalo area where they could resume seeing patients.
A woman first gets several medical questions answered, Harden said. She wants to confirm she’s pregnant, find out how far along in pregnancy if so, and determine if she has a sexually transmitted disease that can complicate an abortion. They are seen by paid nurses, who are overseen by volunteer doctors.
CompassCares also connects them with agencies willing to work with females during and after their pregnancies, with support, financial assistance, connection to adoption agencies, and other help.
A female who aborts because of all the pressure she feels—from family, a boyfriend, job, financial pressures, or abortion providers—is ultimately an act out of coercion, Harden said.
“It all hits her like a wave. There’s a knee-jerk ‘I’ve got to get out from under this’ reaction. She’s got to get to the point where she can take a breath and consider what she’s truly facing. We can help her overcome those obstacles.”
“We believe everyone is made in the image of God and worthy of protection, both the mother and the child. If we really believe that, it takes a lot of work to support her. The church is willing to do the work, pay for it, walk with her and become friends with her.”
This is not the first time an act of significant abortion-related violence has occurred in Amherst, an affluent suburb outside Buffalo. Dr. Barnett Slepian, one of three doctors who provided abortions in the area, was murdered by a sniper in 1998.
The killer, hiding in the woods behind Slepian’s Amherst home, shot him through the kitchen window one Friday evening after the doctor had returned from his synagogue. The shooter, James Kopp, was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, caught in France in 2001, and extradited. He is now serving life in prison without parole for second-degree murder. The federal government waived the death penalty as an extradition condition.
Following the killing, anti-abortion violence receded, and temperatures cooled as government and activists from both sides hammered out rules to allow clinics to function, medical professionals to go to work, and demonstrators to demonstrate.
