But in some ways, the silence after the stabbing was even worse. It wasn’t just a case of looking down at one’s feet in the hope that the violent Islamist cancellers will pass you by, which would have been bad enough. It was also brute confirmation that some in the new elites actually share the Islamist belief that it is wrong to mock Islam. Sure, they would never assault Rushdie or attack the offices of Charlie Hebdo. But they agree with those people’s violent tormentors that blasphemy against Islam – or ‘Islamophobia’, as it’s fashionable to call it – is a socially destabilising thing that causes ‘suffering’. Remember when big-name writers challenged PEN America’s presentation of Charlie Hebdo with an award for courage? The massacre was sad, they said, but let’s not forget that Charlie Hebdo’s potshots at Islam are designed to cause ‘humiliation and suffering’. This speaking of the ‘suffering’ of hurt feelings mere months after the infliction of real violent suffering on Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists and writers was a testament to the moral disarray of the modern elites.

This is the dark truth of the Rushdie affair: it represents a merging of old-style religious intolerance with the new secular creed of cancellation. Rushdie for the past 30-odd years has been caught in a kind of pincer movement, with pious religious censors on one side and politically correct controllers of public discourse on the other. The attack on him in August was not as alien to our civilisation as we would like to believe. It was really a more violent, more medieval manifestation of an idea that is tragically commonplace now – that words wound, feeling offended is terrible, and steps must sometimes be taken to blacklist or silence those who hurt your feelings. Hadi Matar might yet prove to be simply a more menacing enforcer of the cult of cancellation that has Western society in its baleful grip.

[Compare the silence after the Rushdie attack to the ongoing attempts to cancel JK Rowling over her stand on trans issues. Or for that matter, any particular hyperventilation on the supposed “don’t say gay” legislation in Florida. O’Neill is spot-on here. The West has lost its way in prioritizing feelings over freedom. — Ed]