£80,000 reward to "execute" Salman Rushdie as knighthood row escalates

Blackleaf

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Oct 9, 2004
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Islamic extremists yesterday placed an £80,000 award to execute British novelist Sir Salman Rushdie after the Queen knighted him. Despite being brought up as a Muslim, his 1989 book The Satanic Verses attacked many areas of the religion. He had to have bodyguards, paid for by the British taxpayer, from 1989 until 1998. Pakistan, supposedly an ally of the West in the War on Terror, also said that it was now okay for Muslim suicide bombers to attack Britain. Effigies of Rushdie and the Queen were burnt.

Ironically, yesterday the Queen, dressed in her regalia, attended the service of the Order of the Garter, the world's oldest national order of knighthood, and the pinnacle of the British honours system.


£80,000 reward to 'execute' Rushdie as knighthood row escalates

Iranian MPs and media launch attack on Queen


19th June 2007
Daily Mail

The international row over Salman Rushdie's knighthood escalated after Islamic extremists placed a £80,000 bounty on the writer's head.

The British Government expressed its "deep concern" over reported comments by one of Pakistan's ministers which suggested Rushdie's knighthood could justify suicide attacks.

The announcement comes amid continuing protests in Pakistan over the awarding of the honour to the controversial author.

Earlier in the day Pakistan's government summoned Britain's high commissioner in Islamabad for talks on the escalating row.

"This insulting, suspicious and improper act by the British government is an obvious example of fighting against Islam," Ebrahim Rahimpour, Foreign Ministry director for Western Europe, told British Ambassador Geoffrey Adams.



Salman Rushdie with his wife Padma. Rushdie was awarded an OBE this weekend, but Pakistan has demanded it be withdrawn



Iranian conservatives attacked the Queen over Salman Rushdie's knighthood, with a top MP saying the British monarch lived in a dreamworld and a newspaper labelling her an "old crone".

"Salman Rushdie has turned into a hated corpse which cannot be resurrected by any action," Mohammad Reza Bahonar, first deputy speaker of Iran's parliament, said in an address to the house.

"The action by the British queen in knighting Salman Rushdie, the apostate, is an unwise one," he said, to loud cheers from MPs.

"The British monarch lives under this illusion that Britain is still a 19th century superpower and that bestowing titles is something still deemed important."

Hardline daily Jomhuri Eslami also launched a scathing attack on the queen, describing the monarch as an "old crone" whose action was a "grimace to the Islamic world".

"The question is what the old British crone sought by knighting Rushdie, to help him? Well, her act only shortens Rushdie's pathetic life," it added.

The daily also linked the award of the knighthood - which marked the queen's 81st birthday - to a controversial party at the British embassy on Thursday celebrating the same occasion.

Dozens of Islamist students protested against the party, hurling stones, eggs and paint filled bags outside the doors of the compound in southern Tehranand vented anger against Iranians who attended the event.


The Queen was at the Order of the Garter service yesterday, hours after knighting Rushdie and inflaming tensions in the Islamic world



Tory MP Paul Goodman (Wycombe) accused ministers of failing to deal with incitements to terrorism in the UK and said Mr al-Haq's remarks were such an incitement.

"Although he's since sought partially to withdraw his remarks, no condemnation of them has been forthcoming to date from a higher level within the government of Pakistan," said Mr Goodman.

In London, Lord Ahmed, Britain's first Muslim peer, said he had been appalled by the award to a man he accused of having 'blood on his hands'.

In Pakistan, where effigies of the Queen and 59-year-old Rushdie were burned, a minister appeared to justify suicide bombings as a response to the knighthood.


Flames and the fury: Pakistani Muslims torch a Union Flag during protests in Lahore yesterday



"This is an occasion for the world's 1.5billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision," said Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, Pakistan's religious affairs minister.

"The West is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism," he told his country's parliament.

"If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so, unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title."

The parliament in Islamabad - supposedly a key ally in the war on terror - then backed a government-sponsored motion demanding an apology and the withdrawal of the honour from the The Satanic Verses author.


Sworn enemies: Effigies of Rushdie and the Queen go up in flames



This isn't the first time that Salman Rushdie has his the headlines this year.

There has been much speculation that his three year marriage to Padma Lakshmi is in trouble.

Over the course of their relationship Rushdie and his 36-year-old wife have repeatedly denied claims that he is with for her looks while she is attracted to his wealth and fame.

Padma is a model and actress who has more recently been forging her own career as the host of reality show, Top Chef.

Four years ago the couple went to the trouble of releasing a statement denying Lakshmi found Rushdie "boring" or that he thought she wasn't "intellectually stimulating enough".

However rumours of an impending split have persisted.

As a backlash begins in the Muslim world against Rushdie's knighthood, same way as last year's furore over 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper.

There were violent protests throughout Europe and the Middle East, Danish citizens were warned not to travel to Arab countries and more than a dozen countries removed Danish goods from their shops.

Labour's Lord Ahmed expressed surprise at the decision to give a knighthood to Rushdie, who was placed under a fatwa, or death sentence, by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini 18 years ago after the publication of the allegedly blasphemous The Satanic Verses.

"I was appalled to hear Salman Rushdie had been given a knighthood," Lord Ahmed said.

"Two weeks ago the Prime Minister was calling for building relations between the Muslim world and Britain, then suddenly this knighthood is given to a man who has not only been abusive to Muslims, but also to Christians - because he used abusive language towards Jesus Christ."

He said whoever had made the decision had made Gordon Brown's job very difficult as he takes over as Prime Minister.

"The confidence that was being built within Britain with inter-faith work and community cohesion work has once again been damaged because of this provocative decision.

"This man not only provoked violence around the world because of his writings, but there were many people who were killed around the world.

"Forgiving and forgetting is one thing, but honouring the man who has blood on his hands, sort of, because of what he did, I think is going a bit too far."

In the Iranian capital Tehran, officials of a group called The Organisation to Commemorate the Martyrs of the Muslim World said a £80,000 reward should be paid to anyone 'who was able to execute the apostate Salman Rushdie'.

Forouz Rajaefar, the general secretary, said that the decision to honour Rushdie with a knight-hood demonstrated the animosity of Britain towards Islam.

He added: "The British and the supporters of the anti-Islam Salman Rushdie could rest assured that the writer's nightmare will not end until the moment of his death and we will bestow kisses on the hands of whomsoever is able to execute this apostate."

Iranian MP Mehdi Kuchakzadeh declared: "Rushdie died the moment the late Imam (Khomeini) issued the fatwa.

"It would be a hollow dream for the Queen of England to think that with such a move she could
revive one of her mercenaries to oppose Islam. Granting a knighthood to Salman Rushdie will only lead to further hatred towards Britain."

In the eastern Pakistan city of Multan, hard-line students burned effigies of the Queen and Rushdie.

About 100 students carrying banners condemning the author also chanted, 'Kill him! Kill him!'

Asim Dahr, a student leader demanded Rushdie face Islamic justice. "This Queen has made a mockery of Muslims by giving him a title of sir," he told the demonstrators.

Pakistan's foreign ministry spokesman Tasnim Aslam said Rushdie's knighthood would hamper inter-faith understanding and that Islamabad would protest to London.

"We deplore the decision of the British government to knight him. Salman Rushdie has tried to insult and malign Muslims."

As his apparent justification of suicide bombers was reported, ul-Haq took a step back and said he was trying to stress what was at the root of terrorism.

The reignited bitterness has caused concern at Scotland Yard. The taxpayer has already spent £10million protecting Rushdie 24-hours a day.

He is afforded the same level of protection as Lady Thatcher or some of the royals.

Robert Brinkley, British high commissioner to Pakistan, defended the honour for Rushdie for his contributions to literature.

"It is simply untrue to suggest that this in any way is an insult to Islam or the Prophet Mohammed, and we have enormous respect for Islam as a religion and for its intellectual and cultural achievements," Mr Brinkley said.

Asked if he was concerned it could provoke unrest in Pakistan, he replied: "We will just have to see where it goes from here. There's certainly no reason for that."

dailymail.co.uk
 

#juan

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Aug 30, 2005
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First of all: Rushdie is an accomplished writer who has won many awards for his work. Secondly, he was knighted for his total work Thirdly, this man is British and has been for decades. What business is it of any Arab that he gets a knighthood. This is the same pitiful bullsh-t that went on over the Danish cartoonists.

June 18, 2007 2:16 PM | Printable version

The Dickens of our times ... Salman Rushdie
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
It is hardly unexpected, yet nonetheless bizarre, that the Queen's recognition of Salman Rushdie's achievement by honouring him with a knighthood should raise such a storm of controversy.
Judged purely in cultural rather than in political terms after all, Rushdie is undeniably amongst the greats of British literature. He is the Dickens of our times. A visionary realist, his superbly inventive, grandly comic stories chart the great social transitions of our globalising, post-colonial world, with its migrations, its teeming hybrid cities, its clash of unlikenesses, its extremes of love and violence. They do so with a richness of language and narrative which is unsurpassed.
When Midnight's Children, his novel of partition, won the Booker Prize in 1981, it raised the prize, itself, to international prominence. Together with Shame, his satire on Bhutto's Pakistan, and The Satanic Verses, in the first instance a hallucinatory satire on Thatcher's Britain, Rushdie's work also gave birth to a major strand in British fiction. Zadie Smith, Kiran Desai, and a host of other young writers are Rushdie's children, liberated by Rushdie's fiction to find their own voices. His "services to literature", for which the honour is awarded, are in that sense exemplary, even without beginning to list Rushdie's labours on behalf of persecuted writers around the world.
For Iran's foreign ministry to wade into our honours system and portray the decision to honour Rushdie as "an orchestrated act of aggression directed against Islamic societies" is to repeat the mistake which began with Ayatollah Khomeini's Fatwa. That killing review chose utterly to misunderstand the place fiction occupies in the west and subject it to a fundamentalist jurisdiction which essentially recognizes only one book, and that one holy. The journalists, writers and academics who languish in Iran's prisons are a mark of that regime's intolerance of any form of dissent. This is hardly the Islam that most Muslims in Britain would wish to support.
Nor, one hopes, would they wish to echo the condemnation of the honour by Pakistan's national assembly and the demand for it to be withdrawn. (Pakistan banned Shame on its appearance.) Similar pressures from the subcontinent were instrumental in rousing Muslims here to riots and book-burning at the end of 1988 when The Satanic Verses appeared. Few then involved paused to read Rushdie's books - which in fact exposed the very racism and intolerance from which minorities suffered. Indeed, labelling fiction as "blasphemous" is to surrender to those pressures on our cultural life which have historically sought to gag all criticism of the status quo and constrain that dissent which is a necessary part of a mature and plural democracy.

It is surely a mark of the Queen's and her advisors' brave, good judgment that they are prepared to recognize Rushdie for what he is: a great writer of international repute who has long spoken the truth to power, whether that power is political, religious or simply a prominent assembly of right-thinking voices. The fact that Rushdie's work has consistently proved controversial is a sure sign of what is a singular and valuable imagination.
 

EagleSmack

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Feb 16, 2005
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I couldn't agree more.

But boy I wonder if Britain knew it was going to create a storm like it has.
 

Just the Facts

House Member
Oct 15, 2004
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Isn't this the second time Iran has wanted him dead? Look how well it worked the first time.

Still, he had to spend 10 years in hiding. Not exactly good times. They did kill a translator if I recall correctly.

I find this attack on Western Freedom offensive to my sensibilities as a Westerner. I demand that Pakistan apologize forthwith, or else I'll write a letter!!
 

Pangloss

Council Member
Mar 16, 2007
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How about we just medicate the religious - 'cause it seems to take belief in God to justify doing these incredibly stupid and antisocial things. . .

Anybody notice that Rushdie's wife is a total hottie?

Pangloss
 

Kreskin

Doctor of Thinkology
Feb 23, 2006
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The wife has a helluva scar on her arm. Is he one of those cannibals?