Хорошее интервью. Трезво мыслящий человек похоже.
Про ислам и запад:
"If tomorrow the Israel/Palestine issue was resolved to the total happiness of all parties, it would not diminish the amount of terrorism coming out of al-Qa'ida by one jot. It's not what they're after," he adds, his foot tapping against mine as he leans forward. "Yes, it's a recruiting tool, rhetorically. Many people see there's an injustice there, and it helps them to get people into the gang, but it's not what they want. What they want is to change the nature of human life on earth into the image of the Taliban. If you want the whole earth to look like Taliban Afghanistan, then you're on the same side as them. If you don't want that, you're not. They do not represent the quest for human justice. That, I think, is one of the great mistakes of the left."
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He senses soft racism in the refusal to see Islamic fundamentalists for what they are. When looking at the Christian fundamentalists of the United States, most people see an autonomous movement of superstitious madmen. But when they look at their Islamic equivalents, they assume they cannot mean what they say. "One of the things that's commonly said by Islamists is that it's acceptable to bomb a disco, because a disco is a place where people are behaving in a disgusting way. Go away and die - that's all bin Laden wants you to do. It's not just about Iraq, it's about ham sandwiches and kissing in public places and sex with girls you're not married to." He pauses. "It's about life."
It horrifies Rushdie that so many people in his natural political home - the left - don't get it. They seem to imagine that when people call for a novelist to be beheaded for blasphemy, they are really calling for a return to the 1967 borders, or an independent Kashmir, or an end to the occupation of Iraq.
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"But you see it every day, this surrender," he says. He runs through a list of the theatres and galleries that have censored themselves in the face of religious fundamentalist protests. He mentions that the entire British media - from the BBC down - placed itself in purdah during the Mohammed cartoons episode. "What I fear most is that, when we look back in 25 years' time at this moment, what we will have seen is the surrender of the West, without a shot being fired. They'll say that in the name of tolerance and acceptance, we tied our own hands and slit our own throats. One of the things that have made me live my entire life in these countries is because I love the way people live here."
Rushdie sees surrender stamped on every one of the "faith schools" being constructed by Tony Blair. "To say the solution to the problems religion has caused is more religion... it's just crazy," he says. It will only reinforce the sealing off of Muslims from the world that is symbolised by the veil, which he sees as a hideous anti-feminist shroud, " a one-woman tent".
А вот про США. Тоже весьма трезво.
looking to the United States as our anti-Islamist saviour is, he explains, a "terrible mistake. America, like all superpowers, uses only the criterion of self-interest. That's the way in which a superpower operates, whether it's the Soviet Union or the United States. The criterion is what serves the interests of the power. When that coincides with what we call liberal democratic values then, yeah, it will be on that side. But superpowers of every stripe have a history of installing puppets which will serve their interests. Whether it's in Nicaragua, or the Shah of Iran. You can't look to a superpower as a moral arbiter, because its job is not morality. Its job is the preservation of its sphere of influence."
I ask what he thinks about Christopher Hitchens' belief that the US has become a Jeffersonian superpower, bent on spreading democracy across the globe. "It's not true. It's just not true," he says. "You know, I met [Paul] Wolfowitz at Christopher's house on one occasion. And Wolfowitz turned out to be a really nice man - very charming, extremely intelligent, quite self-critical. Many things that you might not have expected him to be. But false idealism, as we know from Graham Greene, can be fantastically self-destructive." So Wolfowitz, a former Deputy Secretary of Defense, is Alden Pyle, the Quiet American, wreaking havoc in the name of righteousness? "Yes. I do think that someone in the name of virtue can do terrible damage, for entirely virtuous reasons. But I've never seen great power as having a moral dimension."
В общем, неглупый мужик. И не partisan. Про ислам у него мнение совпадает с правыми, а про США с левыми. Грубо гoворя.