No one deserves a knighthood more

At last an issue to unite all of us — right, left, Muslim, Christian and Hindu, liberal and conservative. The decision to knight the author Salman Rushdie has brought together, in angry concordat, almost the entire world. There are those who, even now, may be strapping on the semtex to deliver to Rushdie the righteous vengeance of the prophet Mohammed (PBUH). And there are others who will merely write nasty stuff about him for the Guardian and the Evening Standard and maybe cheer quietly if he is, in the end, blown to smithereens by an altogether more proactive and engaged opponent.

Rushdie is loathed — and not just by the mediaevally minded bigots of Islamabad, Tehran and the Finsbury Park mosque. He seems to be loathed by everyone else, too. No sooner had his knighthood been announced than the British Right waded into attack. They hate Rushdie because he has dared, from time to time, to cast doubt upon the righteousness of Britain’s imperial history, been a bit snide about the monarchy and occasionally remarked that our society was not always what is is cracked up to be. Can he not show gratitude, asked the Daily Mail’s Peter McKay in a column of magnificently ignorant bile. We give him expensive police protection when the mad mullahs order his death and he repays us by continuing to speak his mind. Beneath all this is the usually unspoken intimation of racism: Salman — well, he’s a darkie, isn’t he? A chippy little wog. Comes from Bombay or Mumbai or somewhere ghastly like that. You’d think he’d feel even more beholden to his adopted country (or his once adopted country) and less inclined to stick the boot in. You can’t trust them, can you? There is a strand of thought on the right which holds that immigrants — be they second, third or fourth generation — should simply shut up and mind their ps and qs.