‘Horrifying news [regarding Salman Rushdie]. Feeling very sick right now. Let him be okay.’

Author JK Rowling tweeted her concern for Salman Rushdie after he was brutally stabbed by what appears to be an Islamic extremist before he was due to give a lecture on freedom of expression in New York.

For Rushdie, it was the terrifying culmination of decades spent living under the threat of an Islamic fatwa offering millions for his death to avenge the crime of blasphemy.

Student, social and political activist Meer Asif Aziz replied, ‘Don’t worry you are next.’

Unsurprisingly, Rowling asked Twitter to do something about Aziz’s reply, as it appears to contain a threat against her life. Other such posts, either in support of Rushdie’s stabbing or wishing others to be murdered in the name of Islam, were also left up by the Silicon Valley giant.

Twitter remains awash with death threats from Iranian and Islamic accounts. Considering Twitter had no problem removing former President Trump, it seems odd they would leave so many openly violent accounts untouched – unless they are worried about appearing ‘Islamophobic’…? Perhaps we can give them the benefit of the doubt and say they are still getting around to handling all these abuses of their community rules.

Regardless, Twitter owes its users an explanation regarding its policing of hateful content.

Users familiar with Twitter will note that it can take minutes to remove the victims of Covid vaccines or women who dare to challenge the Trans community about the erasure of women’s rights.

Rowling is sensibly working with police over the threats however, considering UK police have made a habit of arresting ordinary people for reblogging harmless memes, one might cynically wonder why authorities show so little interest in death threats when they come from certain protected identity groups. We are yet to see news stories about activists complaining about random door-knocking.

Conservative women on the internet have raised similar questions, particularly during the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots. Many death threats were sent by online trolls claiming to be part of those groups – these included messages about beheading, strangulation, rape, and throwing women off buildings.

Rowling has made public the abuse she receives because she is famous enough to withstand Twitter banning her – something that can happen to women with smaller accounts when they try to speak out. Even if Twitter does not punish them directly, often an activist mob will bombard them with so much abuse that they either ‘shut up’ or leave.

It is evident when viewing content specifically directed at Rowling that the ‘progressive’ youth of social media, largely in the LGBTQ+ movement, have treated her with the same amount of intense, violent hatred as the radical Islamist movement issuing her with death threats.

No, this is not an exaggeration.

For years, Rowling has received death and rape threats from the LGBTQ+ community, along with a relentless torrent of abusive, derogatory, slanderous, and outright pathetic commentary. She has been doxxed by online trolls who posted images of her residence, encouraging dangerous people to confront her in person and – to the infinite shame of large entertainment corporations and so-called ‘Woke’ actors – they have cancelled Rowling from her intellectual property.

Instead of supporting Rowling and celebrating her as one of the most successful authors – of any gender – in history, several of the young stars that her work made famous have essentially blacklisted her. Yes, they still call themselves ‘feminists’.

Twitter likes to make a fuss about community safety guidelines, but it rarely has the guts to suspend, ban, or caution the account of an LGBTQ+ activist, regardless of their behaviour.

User Dataracer went to great effort to put together a selection of tweets to show the extent of abuse from the ‘inclusive’ and ‘tolerant’ Left, who actually come off looking just as hateful, radicalised, and unhinged as the terrorists pursuing Rushdie.

Then there are the blue-tick accounts that appear to wish to see Rowling [insert profanity] silenced.

One verified blue tick account replied, ‘JK Rowling is hateful and wrong. Maybe she needs to check in with her remarks. This isn’t stemming from nothing.’

A better reply would be, ‘Something needs to be done about the horrific rhetoric within the community.’

Photos posted by joepassmore show messages wishing death on JK Rowling at a trans pride march.

 

One user went so far as to transform their death threat into a music video with lyrics including ‘as I kill TERFS’ and ‘JK I hope you fit in a hearse’.

Interestingly, Twitter replied to complaints with a message saying, ‘After viewing the available information, we want to let you know that TrustFundOzu hasn’t broken our safety policies.’

The video was eventually removed, but that no doubt had more to do with the public shaming Twitter received afterwards.

Rowling has done her best to maintain a sense of humour over her abuse, tweeting:

‘I’m afraid I can’t give a shout out to everyone promising to murder me – there are so many of you, and I’m a busy woman – but this one deserves a mention for the nineties rave vibe.’

Comments like these do not mean that she is okay with the situation, but rather suggest that she is trying to highlight its severity without appearing as a victim. It is a difficult situation for women online. I say ‘women’ not to exclude men, but to point out that women are the preferred target of fringe activists at the moment.

These threats go beyond words. Police were involved in an incident when a trans activist urged their Twitter followers to send a bomb to Rowling’s home – a tweet that included the author’s address and the cover of a bomb-making handbook. At this point, that particular trans activist became indistinguishable from an Islamic terrorist inciting their online followers.

And while many women on social media have been forced to brush off death threats – because the platform rarely shows any interest in protecting them – Rushdie’s attack is a reminder that there are people radicalised to hate who will take their threats from text to reality.

What, exactly, is Rowling’s great crime against the Trans community? Mostly, it stems from her insistence that biology matters, that women are entitled to their spaces, and that phrases like ‘people who menstruate’ are offensive. Rowling upholds the sanctity of biological reality when it comes to the rights of women and girls and refuses to bow to industry pressure to ‘toe the line’ when it comes to the activist agenda.

For this, she is threatened with death.

Is this behaviour really so different to Islamic extremists hunting down Salman Rushdie for blasphemy?

Why isn’t there a serious conversation within the LGBTQ+ community about respect for opposing views and the need to urgently deradicalise activists away from violent commentary? How does the ‘words are literal violence’ movement square its ethics when so many people within it use violent language?

If this behaviour was coming from straight white men, there would be a full inquiry into online hate and school programs to address it. Rowling is a target, just like Rushdie. Are we really going to wait for something terrible to happen before addressing the obvious problems within activist communities?