A year or so after the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, I found myself opining that a senior Conservative MP had been “wrong to criticize Rushdie on political grounds for his comparison of Britain with Nazi Germany and for his crude insults for Mrs. Thatcher. But they’re certainly contemptible on literary grounds.” At the time Rushdie responded by saying that “Mr. Steyn may think it bad form to get angry about racial bigotry, but he ought at least to study what a man actually said before calling him ‘contemptible.’ ” For my enlightenment, he then repeated what he’d actually said: “Britain isn’t Nazi Germany. The British Empire wasn’t the Third Reich. But in postwar Germany attempts were made by many people to purify German thought and the German language of the pollution of Nazism. But British thought has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.”

I haven’t thought about those lines in five years. Reading them again, I’m struck by the oddly Nazi-esque tone—all that “purifying” of “thought” and “cleansing” of “filth.” Since Rushdie is a writer, one must assume he has selected his words with care. Granted that the passage pre-dates the Ayatollah’s death warrant, the sentiments still sound odd coming from a man who has chosen to defend himself on the ground of free speech: you cannot advocate the purification of thought and the cleansing of a particular filth, and then object when some wackoes in Teheran decide they want to purify the world of your