Rushdie's right to free speech has been championed because he exercised it to imagine an alternative formative history of Islam and implicitly question the authority of clerics and governments in far-off lands.
Assange's right to free speech has been ridiculed, ignored or at best supported weakly and equivocally because he exercised it to hold up a mirror to the West, showing exactly what our governments are doing, in secret, in many of those same far-off lands.
Rushdie's right to life was threatened by distant clerics and governments for questioning the moral basis of their power. Assange's right to life is threatened by Western governments because he questioned the moral basis of their power.
Worthy victims
If we lived in functioning democratic societies in the West - ones where power is not so deeply entrenched we are largely blind to its exercise - no journalist, no media commentator, no writer, no politician would fail to understand that Assange's plight deserves far more attention and expressions of concern than Rushdie's.
It is our own governments, not "mad mullahs" in Iran, who threaten the free society that permitted Rushdie to publish his novel. If Assange is crushed, so is the basis of our fundamental democratic rights: to know what is being done in our name and to hold our leaders to account.
If Rushdie is silenced, we will still have those freedoms, even if, as individuals, we will feel a little more nervous about saying anything that might be construed as an insult to the Prophet Mohammed.
So why are the vast majority of us so much more invested in Rushdie's fate than Assange's? Simply because our sympathy has been elicited for one of them and not the other.
Ultimately, that has nothing to do with whether one or the other is more worthy, more of a victim. It has to do with how much they have, or have not, served the interests of a Western narrative that constantly reinforces the idea that we are the Good Guys and they are the Bad Guys.
Rushdie and the fatwa against him became a cause ce'là ¨bre for Western elites because he offered a literary sensibility to one of the West's most cherished modern pieties: that Islam poses an existential threat to the values of an enlightened West. Here was a man, born to a Muslim family in India, attacking the religion he supposedly knew best. He was an insider spilling the beans, stating what other Muslims were allegedly too cowed to admit in public.
Though it was doubtless not his intention or his fault, Rushdie was quickly adopted as a literary mascot by Western liberals who were pushing their own "clash of civilizations" thesis. That is not a judgment on the merits of his novel - I am not equipped to make that assessment - but a judgment on the motivations of so many of his champions and on why his work resonates so strongly with them.
Racist worldview
In a real sense, that is true of all literature. It earns its status within a cultural milieu, one policed by media elites with their own agendas. It is they who decide whether a manuscript is published or discarded, whether the subsequent book is reviewed or ignored, whether it is celebrated or ridiculed, whether it is promoted or falls into obscurity.
We tell ourselves, or we are told, that this process of weeding out is decided strictly on the basis of merit. But if we pause to think, the reality is that a work finds an audience only if it stays within a socially constructed consensus that gives it meaning or if it challenges that consensus at a time when challenges to the consensus are overdue.
George Orwell is a good example of how this works. He prospered - or at least his reputation did - from the fact that he questioned certainties about the "natural order" that had long been enforced by Western elites but had become hard to sustain after two world wars in quick succession. At the same time, he exposed the dangers of an authoritarianism that could be easily ascribed to the West's main adversary, the Soviet Union.
Orwell's body of work contains ideas that speak to universal values. But that is only part of the reason it has endured. It also benefited from the fact that the ambiguity inherent in those universal lessons could be recruited to a much narrower agenda by Western elites, readying for a Cold War that was about to become the tragic legacy of those two preceding hot wars.
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