Now that U.S. intelligence officials believe that North Korea was behind the cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, the discussion has finally moved away from e-mails about Angelina Jolie to the real story, which is far more troubling. One of the nastiest regimes in the world effectively threatened to launch terrorist attacks in the United States if an artistic work was shown publicly. And, stunningly, almost everyone involved has caved.
Imagine that the Iranian government had threatened a terrorist attack on U.S. soil if, say, a book were about to be released that parodied its supreme leader. Would we not regard this as an intolerable surrender to threats of terrorism and a violation of core principles such as freedom of speech? In fact, a somewhat similar situation did arise in the fatwa pronounced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on Salman Rushdie because of the author’s 1988 book “The Satanic Verses.” And much of the free world — although certainly not all — defended Rushdie’s right to write a satirical, even inflammatory, book about Islam and its prophet.
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