Sir Salman Rushdie: Naughty And Not All that Nice
SALMAN Rushdie? Why protest about him when there’s so much else to scream about:
What an extraordinary, if depressingly predictable, fuss about Salman Rushdie’s knighthood. Eighteen years after the fatwa was issued, Ijaz ul-Haq, the Pakistani religious affairs minister, last week told his country’s parliament that “if someone exploded a bomb on Rushdie’s body, he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the ‘sir’ title”.
Union Jacks were burnt in Pakistan, with rioters shouting “Kill him!”. If I were Pakistani, I’d be more inclined to riot about the monstrous off-the-scale corruption that riddled my government, and the corrupted version of Islam that brainwashed disenfranchised young men in the madrasahs, but anyway. A spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry said that to honour “an apostate and one of the most hated figures in the Islamic world” indicated that Britain supported “the insult to Islamic values”.
Posted: 24th, June 2007 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
