你不必同意这位作家兼活动家的观点，也能看出英国对言论的压制是个问题。作者：乔治·帕克10月14日，出版商法伯公司宣布，将停止在英国销售爱尔兰小说家萨莉·鲁尼的书籍。鲁尼已表示打算将她的版税收入捐给一个名为“巴勒斯坦行动”的组织，该组织去年被英国政府列为禁令团体。出版商得出结论，无法继续支付最终会落入注册恐怖组织手中的版税。
You don’t have to agree with the author and activist to see that Britain’s suppression of speech is a problem. By George Packer On October 14, the publisher Faber & Faber announced that it would stop selling books by the Irish novelist Sally Rooney in the United Kingdom. Rooney has declared her intention to donate her earnings to a group called Palestine Action, which was banned last year by the British government. Her publisher concluded that it could not continue to pay royalties that would end up in the hands of a registered terrorist organization.
“出售作家作品却无法将收益转交给作家，对出版商而言是一种不可接受的局面，”法伯公司在声明中说。“因此，在征得萨莉完全同意的情况下，我们决定不再以任何形式在英国供应她的作品。”几乎立即，包括《正常人》和《与朋友交谈》在内的国际畅销书开始从英国书店货架上消失。
“To sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher,” Faber said in a statement. “As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format.”Almost immediately, international best sellers such as Normal People and Conversations With Friends began to disappear from the shelves of British bookstores.
由于鲁尼既是“她那一代人的代言人”，又是亲巴勒斯坦活动家，法伯公司的决定在巴勒斯坦事业的支持者、言论自由捍卫者以及作家和读者中引发了强烈抗议。但鲁尼的书并未被禁。相反，这位爱尔兰公民作家决定挑战一个外国——英国——的法律。英国2000年《反恐法》规定，如果一个人“提供金钱或其他财产”，且“知晓或有合理理由怀疑其将或可能被用于恐怖主义目的”，即属犯罪。在这种宽泛的措辞下，出版商将与其明星作家一同承担法律责任。
Because of Rooney’s fame as both a “voice of her generation” and a pro-Palestinian activist, Faber’s decision provoked an outcry among advocates of the Palestinian cause, defenders of free expression, and writers and readers. But Rooney’s books haven’t been banned. Rather, their author, an Irish citizen, has decided to challenge the law of a foreign country, the United Kingdom. Britain’s 2000 Terrorism Act makes it a crime if a person “provides money or other property” and “knows or has reasonable cause to suspect that it will or may be used for the purposes of terrorism.”In this expansive language, the publisher would be on the hook along with its star author.
罗尼承诺将版税捐赠给“巴勒斯坦行动”，迫使她的出版社就范——法伯出版社简短声明中的关键措辞是“完全同意萨莉的做法”。法伯本可以像其他案件中勇敢的出版社那样，在法庭上对法律进行检验，但它选择了一条与罗尼合作的更直接的路径。毫无疑问，她清楚自己在做什么。她肯定预料到了随后而来的愤怒社论、社交媒体帖子和公开信的风暴。
By promising her royalties to Palestine Action, Rooney has forced her publisher’s hand—the key phrase in Faber’s brief statement is “in full agreement with Sally.”Faber could have tested the law in court, as courageous publishers have done in other cases, but it took a more direct course in cooperation with Rooney. No doubt she knows what she’s doing. She must have anticipated the storm of indignant editorials, social-media posts, and open letters that has followed the withdrawal of her books.
她以巨大的个人代价和出版社代价为代价，利用自己的文化影响力，引起人们对“巴勒斯坦行动”被禁的关注，并让英国政府难堪，迫使其撤销禁令。这不是一个关于文学审查的故事，而是一个为政治目的而进行公民抗命的故事。
At considerable cost to herself and her publisher, she’s using her cultural power to draw attention to the ban on Palestine Action and embarrass the British government into reversing it. This is not a story of literary censorship, but one of civil disobedience for political ends.
如果罗尼将版税指定捐赠给哈马斯，那就没什么好多说了——她理应承担一项合理法律的愤怒制裁。但“巴勒斯坦行动”不是哈马斯；也不是“山顶青年”，那个由暴力约旦河西岸定居者组成的运动。它是一个松散组织的亲巴勒斯坦英国活动家“直接行动”团体，其直接目标是阻断向以色列的武器输送，其战术等同于破坏财产。2025年夏季，成员闯入牛津郡的一处皇家空军基地，在两架军用飞机上喷洒红色油漆，这促使英国工党政府将“巴勒斯坦行动”指定为恐怖组织。
If Rooney had earmarked her royalties for Hamas, there would be nothing more to say—she would deserve the wrath of a reasonable law. But Palestine Action isn’t Hamas; nor is it the Hilltop Youth, the movement of violent West Bank settlers. It’s a loosely organized “direct action” group of pro-Palestinian British activists whose immediate goal is to interrupt the transfer of weapons to Israel, and whose tactics amount to vandalism of property. In the summer of 2025, members broke into a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire and sprayed red paint on a pair of military planes, which provoked Britain’s Labour government into designating Palestine Action a terrorist organization.
其他一些行为虽然没有那么引人注目，但在某些方面却更加恶劣。在伦敦北部一个正统派社区中，一些破坏者故意毁坏了属于犹太人的投资企业的窗户，理由是该企业据称与一家武器制造商有联系。窃贼们宣称从曼彻斯特大学偷走了查伊姆·魏茨曼（以色列首任总统）的两座半身像；其中一座半身像已被他们毁坏。当一个支持以色列的组织悬赏1万美元要求归还这些半身像时，窃贼们竟然提出用一只被割下的耳朵来换取这笔钱。
Other acts have been less spectacular but, in some ways, more vile. Vandals defaced and smashed the windows of a Jewish-owned investment business in an Orthodox neighborhood of North London because of its supposed ties to a weapons manufacturer. Thieves announced that they had stolen two busts of Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, from the University of Manchester, where he had once been a senior lecturer in chemistry. They beheaded one, and when a pro-Israel group offered $10,000 for the busts’ return, they proposed sending an amputated ear in exchange for the money.
Palestine Action组织在社交媒体上写道：“第一座魏茨曼的半身像已经‘死了’；很快，他的‘犹太复国主义事业’也会随之终结。”（后来发现第二座半身像其实属于另一位化学家。）到目前为止，这个组织已经对一名真实的人类造成了伤害：在一次闯入武器工厂的犯罪事件中，一名成员用大锤袭击了一名跪着的警察，导致她背部骨折。
“First bust of Weizmann is dead,” Palestine Action posted on X. “Soon, his Zionist project will be too.” (The second bust turned out to be that of a different chemist.) So far, the group has seriously harmed one flesh-and-blood human being, when a member swung a sledgehammer at a kneeling police sergeant and fractured her back during a break-in at a weapons factory. Sally Rooney’s favored activists play at being terrorists, but in fact they’re merely criminal and, by almost any definition, anti-Semitic.
萨莉·鲁尼（Sally Rooney）所推崇的那些“活动家”其实只是罪犯罢了；从任何角度来看，他们的行为都属于反犹太主义行为。英国早已拥有相关法律来惩处这类犯罪行为。将Palestine Action组织与伊斯兰国（ISIS）或基地组织（al-Qaeda）相提并论，简直让“恐怖主义”这个词失去了其原有的意义。更糟糕的是，《反恐怖主义法》的适用范围已经被大幅扩大——任何以“鲁莽”的方式“表达支持被禁止组织的观点或信念”的人都有可能被逮捕。
Britain already has laws that can deal with them. To lump Palestine Action with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda makes the word terrorism almost meaningless. Even worse, the Terrorism Act has been amended so broadly that anyone who “expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization” in a “reckless” way could get arrested. As a result, hundreds of protesters—white-haired pensioners and vicars as well as keffiyeh-muffled fellow travelers—have been detained in the past year just for holding up placards that say I Oppose Genocide.
因此，在过去一年里，数百名抗议者（包括白发苍苍的退休老人、牧师，以及戴着头巾的旅行者）仅仅因为举着写有“我反对种族灭绝，我支持Palestine Action”字样的标语牌就被拘留。这种荒谬的现象在英国内政部的最新报告中得到了体现：截至2026年6月，英国因与恐怖主义相关的活动共逮捕了3,867人——这一数字比Palestine Action组织被取缔之前的年份增长了1,553%。
I Support Palestine Action. This absurdity shows up in a recent report from Britain’s Home Office: There were “3,867 arrests for terrorism-related activity in the year ending June 2026”—an increase of 1,553 percent over the previous year, before Palestine Action was banned.
如果罗琳极其畅销的小说被撤出销售一事能够说服英国议会修改法律、扩大政治活动人士的言论空间，那她算是为言论自由做了一件好事。但没有理由相信这是她的目的，也没有理由相信她有多么在乎言论自由。罗琳已成为对以色列文化抵制运动的著名倡导者——既是文学界的名号，也是这场运动的面孔——这场抵制也包括那些未能达到她严苛标准的作家和出版商，她的标准是与他们出生并生活的国家彻底切割。
If the withdrawal from sale of Rooney’s immensely popular novels can persuade the British Parliament to amend the law and expand the permissible speech of political activists, she will have done a service for freedom of expression. But there’s no reason to believe that this is her aim, or that she even cares very much about free speech. Rooney has become a prominent advocate—the literary name and face—for the cultural boycott of Israel, including those writers and publishers who fail to meet her exacting criteria for total separation from the state where they were born and live.
她拒绝允许自己最新的几本书被翻译成希伯来文，直到她找到一个支持抵制运动的以色列出版商。
She refused to allow her most recent books to be translated into Hebrew until she found an Israeli publisher that supports the boycott movement.
抵制运动的目的是排斥其目标对象——使他们难以或无法过正常的公共生活。对作家而言，这意味着被封杀。检验一个人是否真正致力于言论自由，唯一的标准就是看其如何对待那些自己不同意、不喜欢甚至鄙视的人的言论。罗琳没有通过这项检验，而且似乎也没有兴趣通过。巴勒斯坦行动组织应被取消恐怖组织的认定；其破坏者应依据普通法律被起诉；其支持者应被允许举标语牌；罗琳的书应该被上架、销售和阅读。但不应把她变成一个她自己并不真正信仰的原则的殉道者。
The purpose of a boycott is to ostracize its targets—to make it difficult or impossible for them to carry on a normal public existence. For writers, this means to be silenced. The only test of a commitment to free speech is the speech of people you disagree with, dislike, even despise. It’s a test that Rooney doesn’t pass and seems to have no interest in passing. Palestine Action should be undesignated as a terrorist organization; its vandals should be prosecuted under ordinary laws; its supporters should be allowed to hold up placards; Rooney’s books should be stocked, sold, and read. But she shouldn’t be turned into a martyr for a principle in which she herself has no real belief.