Tough retrospect, “Twenty years on”:

The lesson of the Rushdie Affair that has never been learnt is that liberals have made their own monsters. It is the liberal fear of giving offence that has helped create a culture in which people take offence so easily. There’s a scene in The Satanic Verses in which one of the characters, Saladin Chamcha, finds himself in an immigration detention centre. All the inmates have been turned into monsters—manticores and water buffalos. ‘How could they do it?’ Saladin wants to know. ‘They describe us’, comes the reply, ‘that’s all. They have the power of description and we succumb to the pictures they construct.’

Rushdie was writing about the impact of racism. But he might as well have been writing about the response to the Rushdie Affair. By accepting the fiction that hostility to The Satanic Verses was driven by theology, that all Muslims were offended by the novel and that in a plural society speech must necessarily be less free, liberals have helped create a culture of grievance in which being offended has become a badge of identity. The myths about the Rushdie affair have created many of the post-Rushdie monsters. If we want to slay those monsters, we also have to get rid of those myths.