This, on student protests—Salman Rushdie in a May 19 interview with Bild, a German tabloid:
Right
now, [one] has to be distressed by what is happening in Gaza because of
the quantity of innocent death. I would just like some of the protests
to mention Hamas, because that’s where this started.
And Hamas is a
terrorist organization, and it’s very strange for young, progressive
student politics to kind of support a fascist terrorist group. They’re
talking about “free Palestine,” and I mean, I’m somebody who has argued
for a Palestinian state for most of my life—I mean, since the 1980s,
probably.
Right now, if there was a Palestinian state, it would be run
by Hamas, and that would make it a Taliban-like state, and it would be a
client state of Iran. And is that what the progressive movements of the
Western left wish to create? To have another Taliban, another
ayatollah-like state in the Middle East, right next to Israel?
So I feel
that there’s not a lot of deep thought happening. There’s an emotional
reaction to the death in Gaza, and that’s absolutely right. But when it
slides over towards antisemitism, and sometimes to actual support of
Hamas, then it’s very problematic.
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