I read novelist Salman Rushdie’s harrowing account of his near-assassination about a year ago. It’s still etched in my mind.

In his memoir “Knife,” Rushdie described in detail how he almost died in 2022 after being stabbed 12 times by a madman who hated Rushdie’s work. The Booker Prize-winning author, who was blinded in one eye and is lucky to be alive, was giving a talk in New York about the value of free expression when he was attacked, which is tragically ironic.

Not surprisingly, Rushdie is cautious now about where he speaks and appears in public.

So, it caught my attention when I saw that he’d decided to withdraw as this year’s commencement speaker at Claremont McKenna College, a private school in California.

Rushdie made that call after student and local Muslim groups "condemned" Rushdie's invitation and said it was “disrespectful” for him to step foot on the campus after he had – accurately – described pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses as supporting a........

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