"For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair." ... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it? ... What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: "Not a lot." But I refuse to give in to despair ... because ... I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the ... upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a ... novelist can be accused of having savaged or "mugged" a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its ... victim) and the scapegoat for ... its discontents... . (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?)"