The honourable left-wing response was then and is now to fight back and support Muslims and ex-Muslims around the world who want to resist theocratic politics. In Egypt, Iran and across the "Muslim world", many realised what was at stake and put their own lives in danger by defending Rushdie's ideas and right to publish. But the calculating white leftist could not help noticing that radical identity politics were sweeping the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Supporters of Rushdie were a minority, frequently an embattled minority in Muslim countries. 

Just as the enemies of Dreyfus anticipated fascism, the left-wing intellectuals who went for Rushdie in 1989 anticipated a future when many on the Left would be happy to go along with reactionary and obscurantist forces as long as they were anti-Western. Had it not been for Khomeini's incitements to murder in 1989, wrote the constantly shallow and occasionally sinister Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in 1994, "the world would be hurtling, unchallenged, towards the inalienable right to wear blue jeans and eat McDonald's hamburgers". Many on the Left would concede acres of ground to avoid that appalling fate. Social democratic politicians with large numbers of ethnic minority voters, meanwhile made an equally debased calculation, and are still making it today.

I did not think that my opinion of Jack Straw could sink any lower until I read Joseph Anton. A few years before Khomeini's fatwa, the BBC had broadcast a play many Jews found offensive. While disapproving, Straw gave the proper response. "Democracy is about according rights of free expression to those with whom one profoundly disagrees," he said. When fanatics wanted to murder Rushdie and ban his novel, however, Straw forgot about free expression, and called for a universal blasphemy law that would have banned The Satanic Verses and all other books the religious found offensive. There were many more Muslims than Jews in Straw's Blackburn constituency and in the constituencies of other Labour MPs. As Rushdie reminds us, Tony Blair's Labour government went on to propose a bill to enforce Straw's prohibition, and very nearly succeeded in putting it on the statute book. I am ashamed to say that our freedoms to think, speak and argue feel safer now that Labour is out of power.