Rushdie Warns Palestinian State Could Mirror Taliban Under Hamas, Become Iran's Client State
In a May 19 interview with the German newspaper Bild, Salman Rushdie
Right now, [one] has to be distressed by what is happening in Gaza because of the quantity of innocent death. I would just like some of the protests to mention Hamas, because that’s where this started. And Hamas is a terrorist organization, and it’s very strange for young, progressive student politics to kind of support a fascist terrorist group. They’re talking about “free Palestine,” and I mean, I’m somebody who has argued for a Palestinian state for most of my life—I mean, since the 1980s, probably. Right now, if there was a Palestinian state, it would be run by Hamas, and that would make it a Taliban-like state, and it would be a client state of Iran. And is that what the progressive movements of the Western left wish to create? To have another Taliban, another ayatollah-like state in the Middle East, right next to Israel? So I feel that there’s not a lot of deep thought happening. There’s an emotional reaction to the death in Gaza, and that’s absolutely right. But when it slides over towards antisemitism, and sometimes to actual support of Hamas, then it’s very problematic.
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