In 2015, after jihadists killed eight members of the staff of Charlie Hebdo, PEN America, a venerable institution promoting the interests of writers and of free expression—and one that Salman Rushdie himself once led—presented the survivors with an award for their courage. Fanatics had warned them for years that they’d be killed for their cartoons, but they published anyway. After the slaughter, hundreds of PEN members, led by Teju Cole and Francine Prose, doubted whether they deserved an award, and objected in a sententious, scolding open letter. (I joined PEN that year, and where the application asked my reasons, I wrote “to cancel out the vote of Joyce Carol Oates,” another one of the signers.)

Today, with Rushdie sliced to ribbons in a hospital bed in Erie, it is impossible to read their letter without noticing how fully they surrendered to this cult of offense and took the side of those offended against those slain.

How awful that the Charlie Hebdo artists and writers were shot to death, the signers said. But should we really applaud them? “​​There is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable,” they wrote, “and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.” They then proceeded to explain (after, to be sure, a statement that mass murder is not acceptable) that Charlie Hebdo’s ridiculing of the “marginalized, embattled, and victimized” was also not acceptable. In 1989, Team To Be Sure had betrayed its philistinism by reducing Rushdie’s novel, one of the greatest by a living writer, to an “insult.” PEN’s critics of Charlie Hebdo declared that its “cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering.” The letter did not even attempt to criticize Charlie Hebdo on literary grounds.