Salman Rushdie, a broken man who gave in...

Free Speech died a little...

"I think it actually reads like something that an inquisition would make you sign," he says. "And that's more or less what it was. And I immediately — the moment I left that room in which I'd had that meeting — I began to feel physically ill because I understood that I'd in some way betrayed myself. I felt obliged to repudiate that statement and try and regain myself, for myself. It made me understand that this idea of trying to ingratiate oneself with the enemy was not only absurd, but improper. And in a way, now, looking back at it, I can see that it was beneficial to me because it clarified certain things in my head which were confused up to then."

Salaman Rushdie's pseudonym should have been Winston Smith.  

"They can't get inside you," she had said. But they could get inside you. "What happens to you here is forever," O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.

I do not want to be too harsh on Rushdie because his life was literally on the line and in Iran they still have a fatwa and a reward out on his head (and until you face such a risk you do not know what you would do under similar circumstances). Rushdie is no hero in this, just a broken man.  

Update:
Punishment for blasphemous speech only leads to more deaths.  
We should tell Egypt to pound sand and also withdraw all foreign aid.  
Happy Birthday U.S. Constitution.  It was fun while it lasted (I know Rushdie is a British subject).  
The LA Times is a disgrace.  
No one murdered over this image:  Sorry Islam, learn to deal with it.  
If they kill a few more ambassadors, maybe they will get KSM too?  
Christopher Hitchens on free speech.