>In 1989, the novelist Salman Rushdie went into hiding. The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwā calling on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world” to kill the writer without delay, for which the assassin would receive a bounty of $1 million.
It's not a good look to start your article on how speech is not violence with a concrete example of someone using speech as violence. Or to then keep referring back to it, but only to chastise liberals and leftists for being mildly critical of Rushdie, rather than the actual god damned supreme leader of Iran who called for his death.
Fatwas are exactly the sort of thing I'd point at if I wanted to say that speech is violence. And there are plenty of examples of fatwas in the western world now. Hell, we coined the word "stochastic terrorism" to refer to them, because apparently you're not allowed to call a fatwa a fatwa unless it comes from the Champagne region of France. Otherwise it's just sparkling murder.
To be perfectly clear: we can't have a liberal intellectual society in the Arab world[0] for as long as people like the Ayatollahs have power and a platform. Likewise, speech-shaped violence in the Western[1] world harms liberal values way more than left-wingers saying offensive speech is violence. In fact, the reason why left-wingers are up in arms about offensive equals violent is specifically because a lot of that offensive speech comes with implicit fatwas built-in.
Bonus inaccuracy nit:
>The Roman Catholic Church considered the idea of heliocentricity to be harmful in the 16th century
No, they considered insulting the pope to be harmful. The academic establishment wanted heliocentricity dead, because Galileo was a mathematician - the lowest rung of the academic hierarchy at the time. They silenced Galileo by convincing the Catholics that they had been insulted by a book he published on the topic of heliocentricity.
[0] Iran is majority Shia Muslim but this isn't specific to one sect.
[1] As in, "countries with liberal constitutions and rule of law". Western countries are not literally the westmost parts of the planet.