The author Salman Rushdie, who spent years in hiding after a fatwa was issued against him, has spoken out strongly against the decision by six of his fellow authors to withdraw from the PEN American Center gala in New York over the organization’s decision to honor the magazine Charlie Hebdo with its freedom of expression courage award.
“The award will be given. PEN is holding firm. Just 6 pussies. Six Authors in Search of a bit of Character,” Rushdie wrote on Twitter on Monday, having the day before told the New York Times that the authors — who include Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje and Francine Prose — were “horribly wrong.”
“If PEN as a free-speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name,” Rushdie said. “What I would say to both Peter and Michael and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them.”
PEN is due to honor the Paris-based satirical weekly, where 12 people were killed by gunmen earlier this year, with the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage award on Tuesday next week.
The free speech organization has said that “in paying the ultimate price for the exercise of their freedom, and then soldiering on amid devastating loss, ‘Charlie Hebdo’ deserves to be recognized for its dauntlessness in the face of one of the most noxious assaults on expression in recent memory.”
The prize is set to be accepted by Charlie Hebdo staff member Jean-Baptiste Thoret, who missed the Jan. 7 attack because he arrived late for work that day.
However, last weekend it emerged that six writers, also including Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi, have now withdrawn from the event over the choice of Charlie Hebdo as the award’s recipient.
Prose told reporters that while she was in favor of “freedom of speech without limitations” and “deplored” the shootings at Charlie Hebdo, the award signified “admiration and respect” for its work and “I couldn’t imagine being in the audience when they have a standing ovation for Charlie Hebdo.”
Carey told the New York Times that “a hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about,” adding that “all this is complicated by PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.”
In a letter sent on Sunday last week to PEN American Center trustees, PEN president and author Andrew Solomon acknowledged that “in addition to provoking violent threats from extremists, the ‘Hebdo’ cartoons offended some other Muslims and members of the many other groups they targeted,” but added that “based on their own statements, we believe that ‘Charlie Hebdo’s’ intent was not to ostracize or insult Muslims, but rather to reject forcefully the efforts of a small minority of radical extremists to place broad categories of speech off limits — no matter the purpose, intent, or import of the expression.”
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