Aiding the forces of silence

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Twenty-five years ago, I watched flames consume the office of The Riverdale Press, the community newspaper my father had founded and I had edited for a decade.

The issue on the newsstand that week included an editorial that defended our right to read Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. When I wrote it, I never imagined that it would make my newspaper an early victim of terrorism.

The editorial criticized the big bookstore chains — Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton — for pulling the book from their shelves. Its central argument was: “To suppress a book or punish an idea is to express contempt for the people who read the book or consider the idea. In preferring the logic of the executioner to the logic of debate, the book burners and the Ayatollah Khomeini display their distrust for the principle on which self-government rests, the wisdom and virtue of ordinary people.”

I thought that was motherhood and apple pie. We’ve all learned differently since then, most recently in the horrific assassinations at the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

When The Press fought back — by bringing out its next issue on time a day after the bombing, by continuing its tradition of hard-hitting opinion writing, by publishing a defense of Rushdie on the anniversary of the bombing for the next 10 years — it had help.

Residents, elected officials and community leaders, including many who had criticized the paper in the past, rallied behind it. But the most important source of aid came from the state’s other community newspapers. They reprinted the editorial that had provoked the bombing.

Together with its publication by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Congressional Record and its reproduction in New York Newsday, they brought the message of a 13,000-circulation newspaper to a million readers, a stinging defeat for the terrorists who had sought to suppress it.

Charlie Hebdo, free speech, Salman Rushdie, Bernard L. Stein
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