ABSTRACT
Western governments pressured publishers not to go ahead with plans to translate and release The Satanic Verses. President Frangois Mitterrand of France confirmed his reputation as the intellectual's politician when he labeled the threat against Rushdie and his publishers an absolute evil. The Royal Academy of Letters in Sweden, the eighteen- member body that judges the Nobel Prize for Literature, issued a spineless statement denouncing efforts to impede freedom of expression, but did not refer to Khomeini by name. Alexander Cockburn admonished Rushdie for apologizing to Khomeini, because his regret would not propitiate Khomeini and was manifestly untrue anyway. Jean-Marie Lustiger, the cardinal of Paris, adopted perhaps the most pro-Khomeini position of any religious figure in the West, telling a television audience that Western governments have no right to meddle in religious or cultural issues of no concern to them.
