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The press under attack
In the last few weeks, few topics have been as hotly debated as Salman Rushdie and his novel, The Satanic Verses.
Mr. Rushdie is now in hiding in England after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini put a bounty on his head. In this country, fanatics believed to be sponsored by the Ayatollah’s fundamentalist dictatorship have been linked to the bombings of two bookstores in Berkeley, Calif. Last Friday, also in California, the car driven by the wife of Navy Capt. Will Rogers III was bombed. Mrs. Rogers narrowly escaped injury, and again the evidence points to the Ayatollah.
On Feb. 28, a newspaper became the target. The Riverdale Press, a weekly newspaper which covers the community of that name in The Bronx, N. Y., was firebombed and its offices destroyed. Luckily, the early morning attack injured no one.
The FBI believes that an editorial written the previous week condemning the removal of Mr. Rushdie’s book from bookstore shelves prompted the attack. Editor Bernard “Buddy” Stein, who publishes the paper along with his brother Richard, has twice been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes for his editorial writing.
The bomber failed to silence The Riverdale Press.
It published as usual that Thursday, continuing the proud tradition of community newspapers across this land which refuse to allow lunatics and zealots, however violent their threats and acts, to silence them or to deny them, and their readers, their freedom under the First Amendment.
Most newspapers, thankfully, never have to deal with such a terrifying threat. But the firebombing of The Riverdale Press makes us think about the possibility — and that is what the terrorists seek.
They seek to silence courageous voices by fear — by the threat of violence and death.
But they can’t win as long as Buddy Stein, and others like him, refuse to bow to intimidation.
What follows is the editorial written by Mr. Stein which appeared in the Feb. 23 issue of The Riverdale Press. It is reprinted here in response to an editorial suggestion in the Queens Tribune that all community newspapers across America publish Mr. Stein’s editorial this week, “as an act of symbolic solidarity in support of the principle of a free press.”
Mi Hl\,tHl)ALI FRt SS—Thursday February ?3 1989
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