Confronting Terror
Saturday 28 February 8.30pm
Bernard-Henri Lévy, Salman Rushdie
Chair: Jonathan Freedland
George Webber Memorial Evening
In 1989 Salman Rushdie was
sentenced to death for blasphemy after publishing The Satanic Verses, a
fictional and imaginative portrayal of Islam, which the Iranian government
described as a ‘provocative American deed’. He lived in hiding for nine years
and saw his literary collaborators attacked or killed.
Bernard-Henri Lévy spent
a year investigating and writing Who Killed Daniel Pearl (2003) about
the American journalist murdered by Islamic extremists in Pakistan in
2002. He concludes that the clash of civilisations is not between Islam and the
West, but between radical and moderate Islam.
Among the last words forced from Pearl by
his captors, both confession and avowal, were, “I come from a family of
Zionists...My father is Jewish...I am Jewish”. To Lévy,
this is ‘an affair that revealed the very heart of modern antisemitism’.
But what about the growing Islamophobia that
parallels it? And what are the connections between American foreign policy, the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the rise of this new extremism?
To open Jewish Book Week 2004, Jonathan Freedland chaired a remarkable meeting between these two
profound thinkers, who explored some of the most critical questions of our post
9/11 world.
Bernard-Henri Lévy is
one of France's
leading philosophers, writers and personalities "accorded the kind of
adulation in France
that most countries reserve for their rock stars". He is the author of 30
books of passionate cultural commentary, biography and fiction, including
several works about the Islamic world. A war reporter during the 1971 conflict
over Bangladesh, he
became famous as the flamboyant founder of the nouveaux philosophes
group in the 1970s. He has served as a diplomat for the French government, most
recently heading a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan
after the fall of the Taliban.
Salman Rushdie was born into a Muslim family in Bombay in
1947, and attended Rugby and
King's College, Cambridge. He
is the author of eight novels, including Midnight's Children (1981), The
Satanic Verses (1989), The Moor's Last Sigh (1996) and The Ground
Beneath Her Feet (1999). In 1981 he was awarded
the Booker Prize for Midnight's
Children, which later received the 'Booker of Bookers' Prize as
the best of the award's recipients in its 25-year history (1993).
Jonathan Freedland is
a broadcaster, Guardian columnist and author.
