The delusional vanity of the Sally Rooney cult

They’re comparing Sally Rooney to Salman Rushdie. I repeat: they’re comparing Sally Rooney to Salman Rushdie. They’re comparing the smuggest, most fawned-over author in Christendom, who withdrew her own books from sale in a pique of infantile rage over Britain’s proscription of Palestine Action, with the man who was hounded across Earth by Islamo-psychopaths doing the evil bidding of Tehran’s tyrants. This is not a drill, guys. Our literary elites have fully succumbed to delusional vanity and they’re determined to drag truth down with them.

It was in the New Statesman that this exquisite piece of brain rot was published. The house mag of the ever-bewildered bourgeois left has published an open letter in defence of Rooney. ‘Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist’, says the headline. No one’s calling her a terrorist, you donuts. Though to be fair, I do feel a tad terrorised by her chick lit for people with PhDs every time I frequent a book shop, where there will invariably be a loving, teetering display of her beige tales of rich-girl melancholia.

The signatories to the letter are the ultimate nightmare blunt rotation. There’s Julian Barnes, Juliet Stevenson, Maxine Peake, Owen Jones, Tilda Swinton, Kneecap, Gary Lineker. Behold the tosserati. And not one brain cell between them! They really seem to think the brutish British state is sending masked commandos into Waterstone’s to pulp every copy of Normal People because its author – like literally every other moneyed moralist on these isles – supports Palestine Action. The ‘withdrawal’ of Rooney’s books ‘on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti-terror legislation’ is ‘an affront to basic principles of free speech’, they cry.

Will someone please sit these bozos down and explain what actually happened? The only person ‘censoring’ Sally Rooney is Sally Rooney. She voluntarily withdrew her books from sale in the UK after her publishers, Faber & Faber, claimed that paying her royalties from Britain could breach terror laws – Rooney has said she plans to keep giving dosh to Palestine Action. This isn’t a Stasi-like assault on the blessed liberties of a novelist – it’s a self-aggrandising stunt in which Rooney is positioning herself as the martyr du jour of the Palestine cult.

Forget vanity publishing – now we have vanity un-publishing. An author metaphorically pulping her own books because she’s so stinking rich she can afford to prioritise preening her own virtuous feathers over racking up more sales. I know Kneecap aren’t the sharpest knives in the draw but surely Julian Barnes knows the difference between a writer having a hissy fit and a writer being gagged by the state? Surely Zadie Smith can distinguish between this attention-seeking self-boycott by the pampered chronicler of Dublin 4 love life and, oh I don’t know, Salman Rushdie?

Yes, let’s talk about Salman Rushdie. He’s name-checked in an accompanying piece in the New Statesman. Rooney and Rushdie are not only adjacent to each other on bookshop shelves, it says – they’re now morally adjacent too, in that both have been punished with censure for their ‘dissent’, their ‘outspokenness’. How dare you. Rushdie spent decades under a state-backed death sentence for writing The Satanic Verses. He faced down fanatical assassins hell-bent on making good on the fatwa issued against him by the nutters of the Islamic Republic. The only tyranny Rooney has ever endured is a lukewarm review in a Sunday supplement.

What a sickening spectacle it is for these Daunt Books wankers who clink their champagne flutes in complete safety to liken one of their kind to that terrorised, hunted hero of artistic freedom. Translators of Rushdie’s work were murdered. Publishers were firebombed. For decades Rushdie was forced to scurry from safe house to safe house. And eventually they got him: he was viciously stabbed in the chest, neck and face in New York in 2022, causing him to go blind in one eye. His literal blindness is a rebuke to the moral blindness of a literary elite that has the depthless nerve to compare Rooney’s theatrical huff with the Islamist savagery he endured.

What’s funny – and by funny I mean vomit-inducing – is that many of the people who signed the letter for Rooney probably wouldn’t have stood with Rushdie in ’89. They certainly wouldn’t stand with any contemporary author brave enough to write a ‘blasphemous’ novel about Islam. They’d wang on about ‘Islamophobia’ and the ‘structural bias’ Muslims must navigate daily yada yada yada. Indeed, tucked among the signatories are people who gloated over the hounding of gender-critical authors – female writers whose only crime is that they know that if you have bollocks you’re a fella. Get Rushdie’s name out of your mouths.

Over the weekend, we learned that not one major publisher in the UK would touch Eli Sharabi’s profound and towering memoir, Hostage. It tells of his 491 days in the cruel captivity of Hamas, and his discovery upon his release that his wife and two daughters had been murdered in that carnival of Islamofascist violence on 7 October 2023. That Britain’s publishing giants weren’t interested in his deeply human tale is not all that surprising. Under the bigoted tyranny of BDS, our cultural elites tend to swerve anything that comes from the Jewish State. This genuinely tyrannical freezing out of Israeli authors and artists is backed by many of the people now cosplaying as free-speech warriors over Rooney’s narcissistic stunt.

Ladies and gentleman, the British publishing industry, where entitled cliques rally around a spoilt author chasing headlines while slamming the door on a Jew who was tortured by Islamo-Nazis. Seriously, fuck these people.