The Fashionable Academic-Intellectual Left

I’m no Rushdie scholar, so I don’t know if the “fashionable academic-intellectual left” really does hate Salman Rushdie. It would have been nice, however, if Geoffrey Wheatcroft had cited a single specimen from that class in his article about people who don’t like Rushdie, rather than simply asserting that “this man can unite Muslims, conservative nationalists, and the fashionable academic-intellectual left in hatred of him,” then providing examples only of the first two. Wheatcroft might also have benefitted his readers by drawing a helpful distinction between those who actually hate Rushdie and those who just think that his recent novels kind of suck.