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.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.