25 years later, new revelations on Prince Charles' cowardly refusal to support Salman Rushdie against Iran's death fatwa

Prince Charles refused to support Sir Salman Rushdie during his fatwa over The Satanic Verses because he thought the book was offensive to Muslims.

In an article for Vanity Fair magazine, Martin Amis claimed that the Prince's views caused a row at a dinner party after Rushdie was issued with the death sentence by Islamic clerics in 1989.

Amis claims that Charles told him that he would not offer support ‘if someone insults someone else’s deepest convictions’.

However, as the Vanity Fair article notes, there were a number of authors who had the courage and conviction to stand by Rushdie in opposition to censorship and the intimidation of death threats:

Stephen King went so far as to intervene on Rushdie’s behalf when a number of bookstores in the U.S. announced plans not to sell the book or to remove it from their shelves. At the behest of two Viking editors, King called the chief of bookstore chain B. Dalton and gave him an ultimatum: “You don’t sell The Satanic Verses, you don’t sell Stephen King.” The store reversed course. “You can’t let intimidation stop books,” King now says, recalling the episode. “It’s as basic as that. Books are life itself.”