Salman Rushdie warns limiting free speech over social justice issues is ‘slippery slope’

25 April 2024, 19:17 | Updated: 25 April 2024, 19:23

'We are on. a slippery slope' with regard to free speech

Salman Rushdie has told LBC that it’s a “very bad time for freedom of expression” as he warned the prioritisation of social justice issues over it is a “slippery slope”.

Speaking to LBC’s Tonight with Andrew Marr, the Satanic Verses author spoke about life after he was violently attacked two years ago and the importance of freedom of speech.

He said: “I think it’s a very bad time for free expression, even before the Israel-Gaza situation it was a bad time because of new pressures against free speech.

“I think there is a very principled younger generation whose priorities are environmental issues and social justice, and see those issues as being above free expression and that if free expression comes into conflict with social justice issues, as they define them, then it must be limited and that’s, I think, a very slippery slope but we’ve been on that slippery slope for some time.”

In 2022, Mr Rushdie was stabbed multiple times at an event in New York, in which he lost sight in his right eye.

Following the attack, Mr Rushdie stepped out the public eye as he recovered, but he has now released a memoir about the attack titled ‘Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder”.

Mr Rushdie, who has taught at different universities across America over 10 years, also spoke to Andrew Marr about the struggle of free speech in universities following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel last year.

Read more: Teenager charged with three counts of attempted murder after two teachers and pupil stabbed at school in Wales

Read more: Runaway Household Cavalry horse ‘Vida’ has ‘history of being spooked and kicked soldier in head during coronation'

He said: “I’ve never seen a time so contested, so difficult for universities to handle, on the one hand you want students to be able to protest…On the other hand, when it spills over as it often has into threats against Jewish students, many reports of that, then that’s very problematic and very hard for university administrators to get it right. And I’m sure they’re all trying to get it right, and some cases feel they’ve got it very wrong, from both sides.”

He continued: “Anti-Semitism has been on the rise… and I think a lot of people protesting what’s happening in Gaza would say that they’re protesting the Israeli state rather than making anti-Semitic remarks but it slides very easily from one to the other. And some, at least, of the protesters have made that journey from protesting against the Israeli government to straightforward hostility towards Jewish people.

“I’m not a big fan of Mr Netanyahu and I’m horrified by the deaths in Gaza but that doesn’t mean that I forget about what Hamas did on October 7 and what Hamas continues to want to do.”