A free Palestine would be a “Taliban-like state,” Salman Rushdie has said.
Speaking during a literary festival in Berlin, Rushdie said: “I have been in favour of a separate Palestinian state most of my life, since the 1980s.
“But if there were a Palestinian state now, it would be run by Hamas and we would have a Taliban-like state – a satellite state of Iran” he told RBB, a local broadcaster, on Thursday. “Is this what the progressive movements of the Western Left want to create?”
Rushdie, who met Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, on Sunday, said he understood concerns over the suffering in Gaza but added: “I would like some protesters to mention the role of Hamas, and that’s a terrorist organisation. It’s quite strange that political progressives support a fascist terrorist group.”
Turning to the pro-Palestinian protests that have swept university campuses around the world, he said: “It is also necessary to ensure that other students do not feel unsafe as a result, or that the protests slide into anti-Semitic discourse, which has happened in many cases.”