“Salman Rushdie warns of greatest threat to freedom of speech in the West”

Freedom of speech in the West is currently experiencing the greatest threat in his lifetime, British writer Salman Rushdie has warned.

Rushdie gave a video speech at the British Book Awards, where he was presented with an award for his contribution to freedom of expression.

The organizers of the event give the award for “the determination of authors, publishers and booksellers to stand up to intolerance, despite the threats”.

“We are living in a time when freedom of expression, freedom of publishing, in my opinion, has never been so threatened in the West in my lifetime,” the India-born writer admitted in his speech.

“Now, being in the United States, I have to watch out for an extreme attack on libraries and children’s books in schools,” the writer said, expressing dismay at the attack on the very idea of ​​the library. “We need to be clearly aware of this and fight hard against it.”

Rushdie also criticized publishers who try to adapt decades-old books to modern politically correct ideas, for example by removing passages of text or rewriting texts from the works of children’s book author Roald Dahl and James Bond creator Ian Fleming.

According to him, publishers should allow books “to come to us from their own time and be in their own time.”

“If it’s hard to accept, don’t read it, read another book,” urged Rushdie.

Rushdie, 75, looked thinner than before the attack nine months ago.

He was wearing glasses with one tinted lens because he lost vision in his right eye and suffered nerve damage in his hand after the writer was seriously injured by a knife-wielding attacker at an event in New York state last August.

Hadi Matar, who was detained on suspicion of the attack, denies his guilt on the charges of assault and attempted murder.

Rushdi’s 1988 novel “Satanic Verses”, which, like many other works of the writer, can also be read in Latvian, caused great indignation among some Muslims, because, in their opinion, it was blasphemous against the Prophet Muhammad.

Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader at the time, issued a fatwa on Rushdie’s assassination. Islamists put a bounty on the writer’s head, which is still in place.