Last Thursday marked the 30th anniversary of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s infamous fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, in which he called on Muslims to murder Rushdie and the publishers of his book The Satanic Verses. While Rushdie has long since come out of hiding, and has expressed his readiness to put the episode behind him, Jonathan Rauch argues that its legacy remains very much alive in the West:

In the nightmarish eruption that followed [Khomeini’s declaration], dozens of people were killed, including the book’s Japanese translator, and many more were threatened. . . . Echoes still reverberate; just this past October, Norwegian police filed charges in the shooting of William Nygaard, the publisher of the Norwegian edition, who was left for dead outside his home (but survived). . . .

The Rushdie affair was hardly the first incident of terrorism committed against Western targets by Islamists, or in the name of Islam or of associated political causes. . . . Even so, in 1989 the Rushdie edict was rightly understood as a paradigm shift. For one thing, it was state-sponsored. Khomeini not only called for multiple assassinations, he put his government’s imprimatur and treasury behind his decree. Further, the attack was global in scope and ambition. By seeking to mobilize Islamist sympathizers everywhere, and by declaring publishers and editors and translators and bookstores to be targets, Khomeini declared borders to be of no consequence. Henceforth, the battlefield had no boundaries. In 1996 and 1998, when Osama bin Laden declared a global war on the United States, Israel, the West, and their allies, he was following the path Khomeini had blazed. . . .

In much the same way that the Columbine High School massacre of 1999 became a template for subsequent school shootings, the Rushdie affair became a template for global intellectual terrorism. In 2005, an eruption over cartoons of Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten left hundreds dead. . . . In 2011 and again in 2015, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was attacked by terrorists in response to Muhammad cartoons. . . .

The broader, less spectacular result of the Rushdie affair has been to chill thought and expression everywhere. “For every exercise in free speech since 1989, such as the Danish Muhammad cartoons or the no-holds-barred studies of Islam published by Prometheus Books,” [the scholar Daniel] Pipes wrote in 2010, “uncountable legions of writers, publishers, and illustrators have shied away from expressing themselves.” Today, we know that the Rushdie affair, though unique, debuted a quite successful business model. Rushdie may be free, but the shadow of the fatwa lingers.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.