Priyamvada Gopal gives us an ugly little passage in connection with Salman Rushdie's knighthood:
Driven underground and into despair by zealotry, Rushdie finally emerged blinking into New York sunshine shortly before the towers came tumbling down. Those formidable literary powers would now be deployed not against, but in the service of, an American regime that had declared its own fundamentalist monopoly on the meanings of "freedom" and "liberation". The Sir Salman recognised for his services to literature is certainly no neocon but is iconic of a more pernicous trend: liberal literati who have assented to the notion that humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally western ideas that have to be defended as such.Rushdie thought what he thought about the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, then, not because of coming freely to conclusions which many others also came to, but because he'd been driven to despair - though this doesn't seem to earn him any 'understanding', as more commonly these days with despair.
Gopal, in any case, has the wrong end of the stick regarding 'humane values, tolerance and freedom'. These are universal values, not specifically western ones - although the West has made a large contribution to their political realization - and that is why many people, including some liberal literati, defend them.
See also David Thompson's thoughts regarding apostates.