Over at City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple remembers the Salman Rushdie affair and the weak-kneed Western response to the head Iranian Islamist in light of the shocking stabbing of the famous writer Friday in western New York state.

Future histories will see the Salman Rushdie affair, which followed the publication in 1988 of his novel, The Satanic Verses, as a pivotal moment in the history of Islamism: for the British response, and that of the West as a whole, was weak and vacillating, encouraging Islamists to imagine that the West was a kind of rotten fruit, ripe to fall from the tree, and therefore susceptible to terrorist attack.