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Salman Rushdie warns of threat to freedom of expression in West

"Voice of the people: Evangelicals know cancel culture
Related: B402, "...and good intentions it started with..." Briboy - Evangelicals perfected cancel culture. Now it’s coming for them.
[...]Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, church youth groups coordinated book burnings and music bonfires to purge their world of evil art. On any given night of the week, televangelists and Christian activists could be found on cable news attacking their enemies by name and blaming them for the “moral decay” of America."

Also related: Religion is the real problem: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and GOP demonize Muslims, but too afraid to take on the real truth
[...]More broadly, once one accepts, on the basis of no objective evidence whatsoever, religious propositions about the nature of reality, a supreme being, and mankind’s relation to alleged commandments issuing from that being, one confronts an inherent wild card: believers may decide to act on the texts they deem sacred, just as the texts tell them to do. Religion, in short, is the problem – and especially Abrahamic religion, with its monotheistic dogma dividing humanity into the saved and the damned.
[ Half of evangelicals support Israel because they believe it is important for fulfilling end-times prophecy
[...]And it would lead us inevitably to one conclusion: religion as a whole, and not just one strain of it, is the problem. None of its far-reaching propositions about the cosmos can be proved. None of them, consequently, deserve respect.
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Disney World and school libraries, for starters.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171920518

Which Party is removing books from libraries and curricula, and revising history lessons so people's feelings don't get hurt?
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171592788

By Farouq Suleiman


Author Salman Rushdie gestures during a news conference before the presentation of his latest book 'Two Years Eight Months
and Twenty-Eight Nights' at the Niemeyer Center in Aviles, northern Spain, October 7, 2015. REUTERS/Eloy Alonso

LONDON, May 16 (Reuters) - Novelist Salman Rushdie has warned that countries in the West face the most severe threats to freedom of expression and freedom to publish in his lifetime, speaking nine months after a man repeatedly stabbed .. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/author-salman-rushdie-attacked-stage-event-new-york-sky-news-2022-08-12/ .. him onstage in New York.

Rushdie, 75, was awarded the 'Freedom to Publish' award by The British Book Awards on Monday.

"We live in a moment, I think, at which freedom of expression, freedom to publish has not in my lifetime been under such threat in the countries of the West,” Rushdie said in a video message from New York broadcast to the award ceremony.

"The freedom to publish, of course, is also the freedom to read and the freedom to write, the ability to write what you want ... to be able to choose what you want to read and not have it decided for you externally."

An attack onstage .. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/author-salman-rushdie-attacked-stage-event-new-york-sky-news-2022-08-12/ .. in August, 2022, during a lecture in New York state left the Indian-born British author blind in one eye .. https://www.reuters.com/world/salman-rushdie-lost-sight-one-eye-following-attack-agent-says-2022-10-23/ .. and affected the use of one of his hands.

Rushdie has long faced death threats linked to his fourth novel, "The Satanic Verses," which was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations upon its 1988 publication over passages deemed to be blasphemous.

Rushdie, who spent years in hiding after Iran's supreme leader at the time pronounced a fatwa, or religious edict, calling upon Muslims to kill him, also referred to the banning .. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-schools-pull-more-than-1000-book-titles-unparalleled-censorship-bid-report-2022-04-07/ .. of certain books in some U.S. school libraries and classrooms.

“In the countries in the West, until recently, there was a fair measure of freedom in the area of publishing. Now I am sitting here in the United States, I have to look at the extraordinary attack on libraries, and books for children in schools," he said.

"The attack on the idea of libraries themselves. It is quite remarkably alarming, and we need to be very aware of it, and to fight against it very hard."

More than a thousand book titles, many addressing racism and LGBTQ issues, have been banned from U.S. classrooms and libraries in the past two years amid pressure from conservative parents and officials, the writers' organization PEN America has said.

Reporting by Farouq Suleiman, Editing by William James and Bernadette Baum

Farouq reports on general news across the United Kingdom and Ireland.

https://www.reuters.com/world/salman-rushdie-warns-threat-freedom-expression-west-2023-05-16/