Johann Hari: Rushdie is not the author of his woes

When did the poisonous habit of blaming the victims of crime for their suffering spread to Britain? From the kidnapped hostages in Iran to the murdered prostitutes in Ipswich to the parents of Madeleine McCann, we have begun to kick people when they are in agony - and with a superior sneer on our faces.

The reaction to the knighthood of the novelist Salman Rushdie is a case study of the new spitefulness. Here's the story. In 1989, Rushdie wrote a superb novel, The Satanic Verses, in the course of which an insane person in a dream says some questioning, querying things about a man who died over a thousand years ago. In response, a theocratic dictator said he should be butchered to death. Millions of people agreed that beheading is a legitimate form of literary criticism, and tried to hunt him down.

For over a decade Rushdie had to live in hiding, shunted from one safe house to another, missing his son's childhood, unable even to walk down the street. One day, he switched on the television to see a BBC studio audience voting on whether he should be killed. (They thought, on balance, he should.)

Now, after enduring decades of this, he is being given a knighthood. I'm no fan of the honours system. Seeing a hereditary monarch reward people by calling them a "Member of the British Empire" in 2007 makes me sad for my country. But if anyone deserves a reward, it's Rushdie - arguably our greatest living novelist, and a symbol of the glories of free speech.

The Satanic Verses will only become a more important novel as the battle to open up Islam intensifies. The book takes its title from a notorious part of the Koran, where Mohammed gave permission for his followers to continue worshipping pagan gods. When several Muslims protested, saying this contradicted everything he had said before, Mohammed claimed Satan must have disguised himself as the Archangel Gabriel and sneakily dictated the passage. Rushdie's central character wonders if more parts of the Koran might have been wrongly dictated.

Rushdie was trying to nudge his fellow Muslims away from a literalist reading of their "Holy Book" and towards a more reflective, independent form of thought. This is what really enraged the Ayatollahs: they wanted to retain their monopoly on interpreting the Koran. The jihadism of the past decade has shown how urgent Rushdie's attempt to nudge Islam away from literalist fanaticism really was.

Yet across the political spectrum, people have reacted by blaming Rushdie for being the victim of wannabe-murderers. "He cost us £10m!" sneers the right-wing press in unison. You might as well say the Soham victims Holly and Jessica "cost us" millions because we had to investigate the crime against them; it makes as much sense.

Ah, the critics say, but he brought it on himself. He wrote things he knew were "provocative". George Galloway, completing his journey to the theocratic far right, has sneered that his novel is "indeed positively Satanic", and said "he turned 1.8 billion people in the world against him when he talked about their prophet in a way that can only be described as blasphemous."

This is exactly analogous to saying a woman wearing a short skirt is responsible for being dragged into an alley and raped. It is also flecked with a form of soft racism, since Galloway assumes all Muslims are excitable children who can only react to querying of the Koran with attempted butchery.

(By the way, literalist followers of the Koran - or any other pre-modern "Holy Book" - are ill-advised to get into a row about whose literature is more "offensive." The Koran has passages calling for the murder of Jews and gays, and instructions on how to beat your wife. The Satanic Verses contains nothing even a scintilla as bad.)

But the new spitefulness continues with a barrage of offensive attacks on this victim of crime. On the right, the columnist Peter McKay thought these renewed death threats - including a call for suicide-bombing by a Pakistani government minister - offered a prime opportunity to beat up the victim, calling him "arrogant" and even asking: "But how much danger was he in?... The death sentence was more symbolic than real." Perhaps McKay would like to tell that to the family of Hitoshi Igarashi, Rushdie's Japanese translator, who was stabbed to death in 1991. I'm sure it feels very "symbolic" to them.

On the left, Lord Ahmed, Britain's first Muslim peer, accused actually Rushdie of having "blood on his hands" - a bizarre inversion of reality. Backing him up, the Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal has jeered that Rushdie thinks "humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally Western ideas."

In fact, Rushdie thinks precisely the opposite, writing: "I have never seen this controversy as a struggle between Western freedoms and Eastern unfreedom... In my lifelong experience of the East I have found people to be every bit as passionate for freedom as any Czech, German or Pole."

To all these people, we should ask - why are you more angry with a man who wrote a novel than with the people who tried to hack him to pieces for it?

But the Rushdie case is only one example of beating up victims. Jon Gaunt used his radio programme to jeer at the McCanns as they searched for their kidnapped daughter. Richard Littlejohn said the terrified Iranian hostage Faye Turney should "join Celebrity Fat Club". He even attacked the women who were killed in Ipswich as "disgusting drug-addled street whores" and "no great loss".

This abuse is an import from the American right, which has become unhinged with hatred for the weak. Ann Coulter said in her number one bestseller Godless that she has "never seen women enjoying their husbands' deaths as much" as the 9/11 victims. The top-rated radio host Glenn Beck recently explained, "It took me about a year to start hating the 9/11 victims' families... When I see a 9/11 victim's family on television, I'm like, 'Shut up!' I'm so sick of them - they're always complaining." He added, "I didn't think I could hate victims faster than the 9-11 victims" - until Hurricane Katrina. He called the people trapped in New Orleans "scumbags" and said "they're ruining it for everybody."

My favourite example, however, comes from far-right columnist Mark Steyn, who attacked the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre. No, that's not a misprint. He said they were "decadent" for not fighting back, and snapped, "They're not 'children.' The [victims] were grown women and - if you'll forgive the expression - men."

Is this what we want to become - people who start jeering the moment bullets are loaded into a gun? The reaction to the renewed savagery against Salman Rushdie shows, alas, we are already there.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

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