Taylor: I stand corrected, but you’re offering some pretty weak sauce. The fact that you have to invoke Hitchens, for example, merely demonstrates how supporting Rushdie was so at odds with ‘leftist principles’ that soon he would no longer count himself among their numbers (nor they he). Citing Hitchens as somehow typifying leftist support for Rushdie is quite a stretch.

Sontag, for her part, was an iconoclast on many issues. Another exception proving the rule. How many leftists, for example would have dared state the following:

“the left have willingly or unwillingly told a lot of lies… Communism is Fascism… Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or [t]he New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?”

That speech drew boos from the left – no surprise. So let’s not pretend Sontag’s support for Rushdie (which I admit I had forgotten about) was given more than lip service among a few of her friends.

Fact is, the only two names you could cite for leftist support of Rushdie are two of the worst examples of mainstream leftist thinking you could have found. Perhaps you need to choose your examples with more care, hmm?

Yes, I said ‘no one’. Mea culpa. I should have said ‘almost’ no one, or better yet, said ‘no MEANINGFUL support’ was offered by the left. It’s a comment section on a blog. I wrote in haste.

Do you also prove your points by finding spelling errors?