The toddlers who attend our sandstone creches to earn their arts degrees – all the while feigning hurt from micro-aggressions – might want to reflect on what a real threat looks like.

Author Salman Rushdie was repeatedly stabbed in the neck and torso at the weekend for words he wrote more than 30 years ago.

His book The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, dared to question Muhammad and the Koran. For this, the former Muslim, was branded a heretic and an apostate.

The then supreme leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, placed a fatwa on Rushdie’s head, offering $2.8 million to anyone who killed him, which was upped to $3.3 million by religious organisations. He died the same year, leaving the fatwa unable to be removed.

On Friday, Salman Rushdie, now aged 75, was about to give an interview in New York when ‘New Jersey man Hadi Matar’ leapt on stage and began stabbing him. Rushdie is expected to survive, but not without losing an eye.

Courage died in the West years ago.

The world has changed in the decades since the mullahs decreed Rushdie must be killed for insulting Islam.

For a start, 40 years ago New Jersey men were not seeking to carry out Islamic fatwas. Moreover, once upon a time, the warriors of the Left would have laid down their lives to protect freedom of speech. Nowadays, they’d cancel Salman Rushdie for hurting Muslim feelings. In fact, I would hardly be surprised if, in the coming days, Rushdie was put on trial for not dying, while his attacker was given no-cash bail and released.

‘Words are violence’ according to the Left, who differ from the mullahs only in the lengths to which they are prepared to go in order to shut up those they don’t like.

Just two days before Rushdie was viciously attacked, The Times newspaper reported that UK universities had put trigger warnings on more than 1,000 books, including works by William Shakespeare, out of concern that some of the words or themes contained therein might ‘cause students harm’.

The University of London now warns students that if they read Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist they will be exposed to ‘domestic violence’ and ‘racial prejudice’.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Underground Railroad, has been removed from an English course at the University of Essex because of its ‘graphic description of violence and slavery’.

Miss Julie, a classic play by August Strindberg, was ‘permanently withdrawn’ from a literature module at the University of Sussex because it contained discussion of suicide.

The University of Greenwich warns students that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘contains self-injurious behaviour, suicide, and animal cruelty’.

The University of Aberdeen has slapped a trigger warning on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream because it contains ‘classism’. And staff now routinely warn students that works by the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, are ‘emotionally challenging’.

For the sake of space I cannot list all 1,000 titles that were deemed unsafe for the babies now enrolled in higher education, but you get the idea.

While cowards running our universities have been pandering to children simultaneously demanding a tertiary education and a safe space from emotionally challenging ideas, Salman Rushdie has been living with a death sentence hanging over his head for merely expressing an idea.

Freedom of speech and expression are under huge threat from Leftism which infantilises young adults, and from Islamic extremism that radicalises young adults.

The kiddies in our universities crying ‘we feel unsafe because words’ embolden knife-wielding zealots. After all, isn’t an Islamic fatwa just Leftism Cancel Culture taken a step further?

What’s the difference between the university toddler who wants a book banned and the Islamic extremist who wants an author killed? Both demand to live in a world where everyone agrees with them, they only disagree on how far they ought go to achieve that end.

The outrage rightly felt at the attack on Salman Rushdie should also be expressed toward the students who sook it up every time they are exposed to a hurty idea, and at the weak adults who accommodate them.

Every decent person hopes both Salman Rushdie and our glorified nursery schools make a full recovery.

You can follow James on Twitter. You can order his new book Notes from Woketopia here.

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