Colchester debate to ask whether religious street preachers should be banned ift.tt/cnMSBfW

How ironic…

Proud to be Polish 🇵🇱

Salman Rushdie lost sight in one eye in a Islamist terrorist attack. Three brave women from Iran and Afghanistan were blinded under Islamism. I survived three assassination plots of the Islamic Republic on U.S. soil. Now we stand together in Poland with one question: Why?? The moment I learned that I would be receiving an award in Poland and sharing the stage with Salman Rushdie, I reached out to the organizers with one request: Please allow me to bring women who were blinded under Islamic Ideology onto that stage. Because the real award belongs to them. Farideh Salavatipour lost both eyes to pellet gunfire during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. Kosar Eftekhari lost one eye when the Islamic Republic shot her in the face with pellets for demanding freedom. And Fahimeh, from Afghanistan, was blinded when her husband threw acid in her face for defending women’s rights. I want the world to look into their eyes and understand the true cost of normalizing the Islamic Republic, the Taliban, and violent Islamist extremism. Oppression begins with compulsory hijab, lashes, prison cells, and the systematic humiliation of women. It escalates into torture, mass killings, and executions and public lashes or public hanging. And it does not stop at national borders. These regimes and their networks have also threatened, hunted, and plotted to assassinate their opponents abroad. Salman Rushdie is a living symbol of how Islamist terrorists reaches far beyond the borders of dictatorships. He was brutally stabbed on American soil and lost sight in one eye. I have survived three plots to kidnap or assassinate me on US soil and I can testify firsthand that the Islamic Republic and other authoritarian regimes use transnational repression to hunt down and silence their opponents abroad. That is why tonight, I will dedicate my award to brave Freedom Fighters especially these women who were blinded for freedom. Tomorrow, these extraordinary women will have something rare: an entire one-hour panel to tell their own stories. I will have the honor of interviewing them. Too often, the world speaks about survivors. This time, the world must listen to them. We also visited Auschwitz together. Standing there, surrounded by the evidence of unimaginable crimes, one truth became painfully clear: “Never again” must never become an empty slogan. We cannot honor the victims of yesterday while turning our backs on those facing atrocities today. And our solidarity must cross borders. I have also invited a woman from Africa to stand alongside the women of Iran and Afghanistan, to remind the world that sexual violence is still being used as a weapon of war and repression. Different countries, different forms of brutality, but one shared struggle for dignity, equality, and freedom. We cannot expect women facing prison, bullets, acid attacks, rape, and execution to defeat these systems of oppression with their bare hands while the rest of the world stands aside. And here is my message to the world: South Africa’s apartheid did not fall because its victims fought alone. It fell because courageous people inside the country resisted, and the world joined their struggle. In the history Poland gave the world Solidarność. Now the women of Iran Afghanistan and Africa need the world to live up to that word. If the world could unite to help end racial apartheid in South Africa, and end tyranny in Poland, it can unite to end dictatorship everywhere. The time for solidarity is not after the atrocities. It is NOW.

The fact this is an open letter calling for the government to reverse a decision which was in fact made by Sally Rooney to stop selling her own books is only exceeded in absurdity by the fact the New Statesman also compares her to Salman Rushdie. Ludicrous.

We have published an open letter against the removal of Sally Rooney’s books from sale in Britain.  Between them, the signatories to the New Statesman open letter have won every major literary prize, from the Booker to the Pulitzer. They include Nobel laureates: Anne Carson, the most recent winner of the literature award; Annie Ernaux, and JM Coetzee. These are voices from all over the world, including pre-eminent novelists: Julian Barnes, Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, George Saunders, Ben Lerner and many more. Key figures in the wider Rooneyverse are signed up: Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones, Alison Oliver, Fionn O’Shea and Lenny Abrahamson. Among the award-winning actors, filmmakers, and screenwriters who have signed include: Tilda Swinton, Susan Sarandon, Jessie Buckley, Jonathan Glazer, Armando Iannucci and Sharon Horgan. In total, over 150 major figures have signed. Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist.