The Metaphysics of Abnormal Life

Does anyone remember the War on Terror? For the past decade, we have been conducting a bold national experiment to determine whether the threat of Islamic terrorism will go away if we just stop paying attention to it. And then a Muslim fanatic jumped onstage to repeatedly stab Salman Rushdie at a speaking event in New York.

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Rushdie is expected to live, but this is a long-delayed follow-through on a religious edict issued decades ago by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini calling for Rushdie to be murdered as an apostate against the Islamic faith, based on his literary work. As usual, we forgot about this fatwa and dropped our guard, but the Iranian regime never did.