Utdrag fra intervjuet i The Spectator med Salman Rushdie:

 

“…There are ideas which grew up in the West, and in a slightly different form they grew up as well in the East — the idea of freedom, of open discourse, of tolerance, of sexual freedom even to the level of hedonism, these are things which human beings have come up with as important ideas everywhere that there have been human beings. So to say that that we must now consider them to be culturally specific… is a denial of human nature…

"We have to get thicker-skinned. If we end up going on being this thin-skinned, we’re going to kill each other. So we need to have the ability to hear unpalatable stuff. What would a “respectful” cartoon look like? The form itself requires disrespect — so you either have the form, or you don’t… I think we’re being extremely wimpish at the level of ideas. People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas — because otherwise we’re all done…

And who, exactly, is being ‘wimpish’? Well, for one, ‘the idiotic Archbishop [of Canterbury] who says there can’t be one law for everyone. That slide into cultural relativism is very, very dangerous. This is supposed to be a really intelligent man. Yet that was a schoolboy mistake. How could anybody who knew the history of this country seriously offer the thought that there should not be one law for everyone, that people would not be equal before the law? It seems to me that the basic principles on which any free society is based are freedom of expression and rule of law — that’s it. If you have those, then you have the foundations of a free society and if you don’t have those, you don’t. So to say “we will voluntarily give up one of those pillars” and not to see that it brings the whole house tumbling down is stupid.’"