Hammer of Los wrote:...
Is that what he is saying?
All he is saying is that there will be consequences if you insult a great religion.
That sentence is just ambiguous enough for it to be an open question, I suppose. So maybe. But I think that if he were, he'd have said "
can be insulted with impunity" and not "
may be insulted with impunity."
I know it seems niggling to take the debate down to that level of detail. But there's so much more than an niggling difference between "I believe that nobody has any reasonable expectation of impunity for insulting a great religion" and "I believe that nobody has any permission or legal justification for insulting a great religion," I'd say the burden's really on Le Carre not to leave readers scrounging for textual clues as to whether he's advocating respect for great religions or censorship. And I really don't see how he could possibly have been unaware of it, given that the whole throwdown started over his belief that nobody should publish
The Satanic Verses in paperback.
So (in short): Try to blame him for the niggling, not me, if you can.
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FWIW, I've got to admit that there's a sense in which he so totally trounces Rushdie/Hitchens (and by extension, far below them, me) that it's practically pointless for me even to make that request, though. He's just so much more ineffably enjoyable to read than they are that even I figuratively perked up and started humming along when I got to his contributions to the discussion. And I'm so totally never going to agree with his argument going in that it should really be an uphill struggle for him to compel my attention long enough to make it.
Also fwiw, that doesn't actually have a thing to do with Rushdie, one way or the other. As far as I'm concerned, Le Carre might as well be saying that there's no law in life or nature that says every trace of Sibel Edmonds shouldn't be wiped out of the congressional record. Because if I'm reading him right, that is what he's saying. And even if I'm not, he'd still be making practically the same case as the one that was later used against her. As a matter of fact. ("Lives, cherished beliefs at stake, must be defended; people already read it, quit whining," essentially.)
Anyway. No matter what either one of them was saying, I'd way rather read Le Carre than Rushdie for pleasure, no contest. And why (for the love of all that is great in religion) that should once again end up making him look good and me bad, I have no idea. But I can see that it does.
He's impressive.