Nick Cohen in the Spectator:

Like online trolls, religious totalitarians want their targets to think about them constantly. If some cannot physically harm their enemies, they will accept mentally crippling them as the next best option. The threats against Rushdie never went away. A few days before we met in 2012, the organisers of the Jaipur Literary Festival had cancelled a booking. They feared that the mere sight of him might lead to assassination attempts, riots, injuries and deaths.

I wrote about it at the time.

I asked why John le Carré had said, ‘My position is that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity’.

‘I gave one of his novels a bad review,’ Rushdie replied ‘Novelists never forgive or forget’.

And as for religious fanatics…

Until 1989, liberal-minded writers thought they could challenge religions that claimed dominion over minds and bodies. No one expected demagogues to whip up mob-hatred against a novelist. Penguin, his publisher, and Rushdie himself had no inkling of the violence that was about to descend on them.

Now writers and publishers know it, and that knowledge changes everything. Try to imagine a liberal or-ex Muslim writer attempting a modern version of The Satanic Verses. And then try to imagine an editor at a mainstream publishing house accepting it. They would be too scared. But they would also be scared to admit they were scared because the macho ideology of publishing, the arts and journalism insists that we are brave taboo-busters, who speak truth to power without fear of the consequences. Instead of admitting their fear, they would say that they did not want to give comfort to the Islamophobic right. When I first heard that argument in the last century I thought it a specious evasion. Now it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When liberals cordon off debates in no-go areas the right and far right has the opportunity to dominate the discussion.

When I made this point to Rushdie he found it too pessimistic. Cowardice resided almost exclusively in the offices of publishers, broadcasters and newspaper editors, he said. Writers should be braver and challenge them.

Now a would-be assassin has done his best to end Salman Rushdie’s challenge to the totalitarian and the obscurantist. Like many others I woke up early this morning to check how he was, and the news from his hospital was grim.

The would-be assassin’s best was much much much too “good.”