Writers Protest Threat to Rushdie

Hundreds of authors marched outside the Iranian Mission to the United Nations in New York today, and some of America’s top writers, vowing not to show fear “in the face of intimidation,” read excerpts from Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses.”

The members of the National Writers Union, on the sidewalk across from the mission, carried signs saying, “Free Speech Is Fundamental” and “Hands Off Our Constitution.”

“I write controversial books. What publisher is now going to take chances with a controversial book?” asked activist Abbie Hoffman, one of about 300 writers marching in a driving rainstorm outside the Iranian mission.

Rushdie has been targeted for assassination by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who considered the novel an insult to Islam.

Union President Alec Dubro was rebuffed by security officers at the mission when he attempted to deliver a letter there expressing outrage at the death threats.

‘So Cowardly’

The writers then marched on two Fifth Avenue bookstores--B. Dalton’s and Barnes & Noble. Both stores are owned by B. Dalton, one of the chains that has pulled the book from its shelves in several cities.

“To see book stores caving in like that to demagoguery is horrifying. These are the largest book-sellers in the country,” said author Laura Shapiro. “They exist in honor of freedom of the press. For them to be so cowardly is despicable.”

Later today in New York, almost 1,000 people jammed the outside of the Columns meeting hall, where only 500 could be admitted under tight security, as prominent writers read excerpts from Rushdie’s book.

About 50 anti-Rushdie demonstrators marched across the street waving placards that read, “Down with Satanic Voices” and “Boycott Viking Penguin,” Rushdie’s publisher.

The meeting of members of the 2,200-member writers’ group PEN American Center included Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, E. L. Doctorow, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Robert Stone and Larry McMurtry.

Sontag, president of PEN American Center, said the organization had been involved in the Rushdie controversy since India banned the book last October.

Since then, she said, “We all have learned how easy it is to be afraid.”

“But if we show fear in the face of this intimidation, all of our institutions that support a free, literate society are hijacked,” she said.

Rushdie sent his greetings to the meeting in a message delivered through his British publisher in which his American wife, poet Marianne Wiggins, told the group that she and her husband are in hiding.

“We writers are a dangerous breed and always have been, and only fear can stop a writer writing and a publisher from publishing his work,” she said.