Rushdie is fine. More than fine, actually: he’s flourishing. Deepa Mehta has filmed Midnight’s Children. Rushdie has written the script, so if viewers wish to protest that the film diminishes, trivialises or otherwise fails to match the glittering standards of his masterpiece they must direct their complaints to him. A US cable network has commissioned him to write a sci-fi series and, like so many others, Rushdie relishes the space and freedom American television gives to dramatists.

The terror, which once dominated his life and the lives of everyone associated with his work, is history now. When Ayatollah Khomeini ordered Muslims to kill him for his blasphemies, Julian Barnes gave him a shrewd piece of advice. However many attempts were made on his life and lives of his translators and publishers, however many times Special Branch moved him from safe house to safe house, he must not allow the “Rushdie affair” to turn him into an obsessive.
Carry on reading

Kaupthing sued them. The paper defended its journalism, and the Danish Press Council rejected the bank’s complaint. But then the bewildered Danish editors were informed that the bank was now suing them – in London, which because Bladet was available in Britain (thanks to the internet), they could do. The newspapermen came from a country where a £25,000 libel suit was considered expensive, but soon racked up legal costs of £1 million in London before the case even came to court. Ekstra Bladet agreed to pay substantial damages to Kaupthing and print an apology.

A few months later Kaupthing collapsed, along with the other Icelandic banks, Iceland’s GDP fell by 65 per cent, and Britain and Holland demanded compensation equivalent of the entire Iceland economy. As Nick Cohen writes in his study of modern censorship, You Can’t Read This Book: “As events were to turn out, the English legal profession had also stopped the British investors who were to lose deposits worth $30 billion in Iceland from learning that there was a whiff of danger around the country’s banks, although no lawyer showed remorse about that.”

At the risk of winning the Order of the Brown Nose, Cohen is perhaps the most insightful, thought-provoking and entertaining political writer in Britain today, and comes from the honest tradition of English liberal thought that threads from John Milton to John Stuart Mill and George Orwell; for that reason he has fallen out with the dishonest liberal tradition, a split that began with the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie on Valentine’s Day, 1989. He has that rare trait of being fair to all parties, refreshing in the tribal atmosphere of political debate, which has no doubt angered sectarians on his side.
Book on sale here
Carry on reading here

The problem with Nick Cohen’s very readable You Can’t Read This Book is the way that you can, glaringly, read this book.

This isn’t quite as glib an observation as it sounds. Cohen’s central point is that the censors’ pens did not fall down with the Berlin Wall. And yet here he is, very obviously free to tell us about them.

Cohen is a rambunctious pessimist. His style involves mustering a degree of anger for a page or two, often through an outrage only loosely connected to the matter at hand (Islam’s treatment of women, segregation in the Deep South, the crimes of Roman Polanski, for example) and then, once the wheels of our righteous indignation are drawn back to the point where they start clicking, he lets go, and lets rip, and woof, it’s awesome.

Strictly speaking there are three essays here. The first, ‘God’, deals with religious censorship; the second, ‘Money’, with legal censorship; and the third, ‘State’, with the internet. Religion takes up over half the book, and starts with Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. ‘I can place public figures of my generation by where they stood on Rushdie, ‘ Cohen writes. He describes a ‘blame the victim’ mentality, evinced by the treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali after the murder of her film-making partner Theodore Van Gogh, and by the Danish Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons of 2005. Fear, he argues, has made us dishonest. Those who consider themselves brave for railing against bigoted fundamentalist Christianity are in fact more cowardly for so glaringly ignoring those other fundamentalists who might put up a fight. ‘Censorship is at its most effective when victims pretend it doesn’t exist.’

This is all good stuff, although Cohen does have a tendency to argue as though he were in a world in which hardly anybody ever says anything critical of Islam, and those who do are invariably making rational points. People who are offended by blasphemy, he notes, consider it akin to libel: the spreading of an untruth. In fact, he points out, it’s more like an invasion of privacy, forcing them to consider arguments they’d rather not. From this, the law has no business protecting anybody.

The essay on the law, and the ability of the rich and powerful to bully their way out of scrutiny, is probably the strongest.

Cohen is that rare and essential breed, the unapologetic hack who wants more invasion of privacy, more investigation, more protection for whistleblowers. He draws a direct link between the decline of media profitability and the financial collapse – the press, he believes, was a watchdog that didn’t bark. He blames this in part on the British courts, and their tendency to help the powerful milk their critics dry. As with those cowed to silence by Islamist terror, censorship here is present in the projects which, for fear of a similar outcome, are never begun.

Where Cohen flounders is when he tackles the internet. In a section about the writer Simon Singh’s libel battle with the British Chiropractic Association, he’s full of approval of the online sceptical communities who begin to make life a misery for all chiropractors, in Singh’s support, reporting them to advertising authorities for making outlandish claims on their websites. Yet isn’t this exactly the sort of thing he’s been railing against, just done by those of whom he approves?

Cohen regards it as naive to think that the web empowers only the powerless; it also empowers those with power already.

He’s right, of course, but it empowers both equally, which is progress. ‘Putin and his mafia friends do not worry overmuch that their opponents can publish somewhere in cyberspace, ‘ he writes, ‘as long as they cannot break away from the fringe and reach the mainstream.’ This was obviously written before a blogger, Alexey Navalny, became the very mainstream face of opposition to Vladimir Putin, but the sentiment is in any case wrong. The great boon of the web is that distinctions between the mainstream and the esoteric crumble. How can Cohen not see that? Maybe it’s an age thing.

But for the most part, he is a deft guide to the frontiers of freedom of the written word, and a welcome reminder that, if you want to find the essential battlefields, Max Mosley and Hugh Grant are entirely the wrong people to ask.

You can read this book, and you probably should.

You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom is available at Amazon and on Kindle here and in the bookshops

The first thing I learned in journalism school was not to say anything bad about the police. If I did, even if I’d seen abuses of power with my own eyes, I could face a suit for damages that would ruin me, my editors and whatever paper had been unfortunate enough to publish my work.

Nick Cohen’s new treatise on censorship, You Can’t Read This Book, airs one of the more painful secrets of the British press – the slide, especially over the last 15 years, towards a culture where archaic libel laws give the wealthy and privileged “the power to enforce a censorship that the naive supposed had vanished with the repressions of the old establishment.”

I recently spent some time in the United States, where the cultural attitude to freedom of the press is rather different. A country that produced Fox News and allows presidential attack ads to run on television can hardly be held up as a gold standard for fair and unbiased reporting, but if American journalism lacks deference, British journalism is crippled by a surfeit of it.
Carry on reading

Prospect 25 January 2012 Issue 191

Nick Cohen’s books are like the best Smiths songs; however depressing the content, the execution is so shimmering, so incandescent with indignation that the overall effect is transcendently uplifting. In 2007’s What’s Left, the last book which I felt compelled to order by the dozen and press upon whoever came to the door (a few Jehovah’s Witnesses went away with more than they bargained for) he examined the truly repulsive spectacle of “how the liberal left of the 20th century came to support the far right of the 21st.” That is, how the enemies of sexism, racism, homophobia and religious mania came to embrace all of those evils in their eagerness to suck up to the last beacon of anti-Americanism: political Islam.

Still, it wasn’t the first time that a strand of Islamism had found itself in bed with an unlikely playmate. In his new book You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (Fourth Estate)—which deals with the rise of self-appointed censors from jihadis to judges — Cohen reminds us that the apartheid regime in South Africa banned The Satanic Verses, and that Salman Rushdie had to pull out of a trip to Johannesburg to discuss the censorship of opponents of white rule because of death threats from South African Islamists.

Closer to home, Cohen tells the story of a band of Asian women who ran hostels for battered wives under the banner of Women Against Fundamentalism finding themselves in the middle of warring Nation Front thugs and religious maniacs. “The women never forgot the experience of seeing apparent enemies unite against them.”

In the unseemly struggle to stifle expression, an unholy smorgasbord of the silly and the sinister (to paraphrase the book’s dedicatee Christopher Hitchens) have linked arms to keep free speech at bay. While we congratulate ourselves on our unparalleled freedom to “be ourselves” we have in fact seen a greater curtailment of real freedom – to write a book, to name a name – than in any other time in recent history. Cohen traces the strange shift of fears in the newsrooms and publishing houses of the west. Modern writers in democratic countries, he argues, are not frightened of attacking politicians. The old deference has gone, and no editor stops journalists or comedians mocking their country’s leaders in the most vicious terms. But artists and reporters who boast of their willingness to “speak truth to power” quietly step back from offending religious fanatics who might kill them and, he adds, the super-rich, who might sue them.

Cohen really hits stride in the chapter The Racism of the Anti-Racists, a remix of the best bits of What’s Left? Once again that peculiar sort of modern white leftist is robustly fingered: the type of half wit, who had he come across his own poor grey-haired old mum being ravished by the late Osama bin Laden and the late Saddam Hussain, would have accused the hapless pensioner of being an agent provocateur of the American Zionist war machine. As it was, he had to make do with calling Ayaan Hirsi Ali a neo-con for daring to speak up for women’s rights. Such people go beyond chutzpah – the first bigots to ever accuse their own critics of bigotry when their own bigotry is highlighted.

Cohen also fast forwards to the brave swordsmen of today – Mosley, Goodwin, Marr, Clarkson, the footballers – and their fearless crusade to obstruct the press. The silly and the sinister join forces once more over super-injunctions to silence others – particularly women.

For years certain lefties have appeared to put more faith in unelected judges than elected politicians to make laws – no doubt something to do with not having to answer to the baying hoi polloi of the electorate. Cohen flays this theory with all the enthusiasm of Miss Whiplash dishing out an Old Bailey Lunchtime Special, fingering British justice as “a legal system that strained its sinews and besmirched its country’s good name to help rich men who thought they could get away with anything”. I remember once on a tour of Pompeii being told that prostitutes of the time were not allowed to speak to civilian, but were generously permitted to howl like dogs after dark to advertise themselves. Whoever would have dreamed that in the 21st century so many people – men and women – could have their voices literally taken from them once more.

You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom is available on Amazon and in bookshops

Into the space vacated by the controversialist Christopher Hitchens we might recruit the sardonic, sceptical columnist Nick Cohen. Here he takes on three mighty, repressive institutions — Religion, Money and the State — and exposes their counterfeit claims of safeguarding liberty, of doing away with censorship, for the empty words that they are in practice. Freedom of speech? Yes, you can write that novel, publish that cartoon — at risk of a fatwa, prison, a firewall, death or a superinjunction. Censorship is subtle and the illusions of freedom are underpinned by the realities of cultures, laws and constitutions, vigorously defended by entrenched interests. Net Utopians who point to information technology as their great hope are deluded, says Cohen. Freedom of speech is still a political struggle.

Fourth Estate, 330pp; £12.99; To buy this book for £11.69 visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 08452712134 or at Amazon here.

Consider the events of the past few days
Carry on reading