Perhaps contemporary ‘cancel culture’ officially began in 1989, when Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie for having ‘defamed’ Islam in The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was ushered into hiding and the Islamist assault on truth-speech in the West was on. But here’s what I also think.
The day after Israel won its 1967 war of self-defense, the propaganda began in deadly earnest against both Israel and the West. Within two decades, perhaps less, Western universities were intellectually and politically ‘occupied’ by Stalinist and Islamist narratives. Balkanized social identities and victimology ruled.
Academics, including feminists (my people), became more obsessed with the alleged occupation of Palestine, a country that had never existed, than with real genocides or the occupation of women’s bodies.
By the 1980s and 1990s, the intelligentsia passionately agreed that ‘Islamophobia’ really existed.
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