The shameful truth – terrorism works

This is a bleak version of looking on the bright side, but what’s astonishing about last week’s vicious stabbing in upstate New York is that such an attack didn’t occur decades ago. However sickeningly incapacitated at present, Salman Rushdie himself would doubtless agree. Having survived unharmed for 33 years under a death sentence – endorsed by a depressingly hefty proportion of Muslims – was no mean feat. Yet that’s too long to maintain nonstop vigilance. Little wonder that Rushdie and his minders let down their guards.

Coming unnervingly close to fulfilling its lethal intent, the frenzied assault at one of the world’s most painfully harmless gatherings (and I should know) – the literary festival – is wretched news not only for the esteemed novelist, his family, friends and readers, but for all writers and our audiences. Because, if experience serves, the response to this attempted murder is apt to materialise in two layers, like a gleaming vanilla icing slathered on a mud pie.