Salman Rushdie and a question of power

Whenever a terrorist attack occurs, like the recent attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, our society falls into the usual platitudes. The attack gets condemned, by most people. The ideology behind the attack is fudged so that it becomes as non-specific as possible. What almost never gets any time in the discussion is the question of answers. It is easy to say ‘We must never give in to terror’ or ‘We must defend the right to free speech.’ But personally I like to get more specific than this. Imagine if you were the UK government, say, and had some power actually to do something about it.

That brings me to the matter of Sayed Ata’ollah Mohajerani.

Mohajerani was a radical student involved in the 1979 revolution in Iran that overthrew the Shah and ushered in the Islamic Revolutionary government that still benights the country today. In the 1980s he became an MP and by the late 1980s he achieved, among other positions, that of deputy prime minister.