Hello and

Welcome to the spike podcast. I'm Fraser Myers and back with me this week as ever we have spikes editor Tom Slater.

Hello. How you doing Ella how are you?

How are you?

Not bad. Ella Wheeling, spike columnist of course. On today's show we're going to be focusing on the Salmon Rushdie

attack and what it means for free speech. So as the whole world will know by now this shocking news happened last week

Samo Rushdie the author of the satanic verses was stabbed multiple times in New York last week.

Tom, first of all, what did you make of the attack

in the shock of it?

And it was incredibly shocking, and stomach turning, really. You did just think the scumbags have finally got him after all this time and I think a lot of us almost were

acting as if not actually thinking this it was kind of all over you know he was only

hiding for 10 years after the fact that's why was declared he's been living a

relatively normal life you showed up at this particular event pretty much about

security and that's how things have been going for a long time now.

But the threat was always there.

The price was still on his head.

And it seems like, although we're still waiting to hear more details,

that this 24-year-old from New Jersey decided to finally act on it.

And I think it's, if this doesn't wake us up to the threat posed by

Islamist intolerance, but also just the new intolerances in general.

Nothing really will.

I mean the symbolic insignificance of someone finally even getting close to him

...