The New Cowardice

Back in 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie over the novel The Satanic Verses, I made a point of getting a copy of it and actually reading the whole thing through. It wasn't the sort of thing that I would normally read, and quite honestly I found a good bit of it tedious, but I was disgusted by the notion of a religious leader calling for the death of a writer (personally I think it's for the unflattering roman a clef portrayal of Khomeini himself, and that the disrespect to Mohammed issue is a convenient cover).

Recently, when the news came out that North Korea was trying to suppress The Interview through  cyberterrorism, I thought I was going to need to sit through a showing of it, just to show my support for intellectual freedom. But it looks like I won't even get the opportunity. Sony has caved completely and shelved the movie indefinitely, rather than even risk the chance that the pudgy little dictator of a two-bit tyranny actually can carry through on his threats of violence against theaters showing it.

What a long way we've fallen in just twenty-five years.