Iran resurrects Salman Rushdie threat

[questionmark]

Iran has seized on widespread Muslim outrage over a film insulting the Prophet Mohammad to revive the death threat against Salman Rushdie, raising the reward for killing him by US$500,000 (£320,000).

Ayatollah Hassan Sanei, head of a powerful state foundation providing relief to the poor, said the film would never have been made if the order to execute Rushdie, issued by the late Iranian spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had been carried out.

Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa sentencing the author to death in 1989 after declaring his novel, The Satanic Verses, "blasphemous", but Iranian officials later indicated it would not be implemented.

"It [the film] won't be the last insulting act as long as Imam Khomeini's historic order on executing the blasphemous Salman Rushdie is not carried out," he said in a statement.

Read more

Why can't I get the image of some kindergarteners out of my head of whom one is crying saying: 'If al-Qaeda has a toy I want one TOOOOOO!' ?

[Ashotep]

They can get ridiculous with their death threats. Yet they wonder why people say negative things about Islam. If the clerics keep it up Salmon will have a best seller.

Edited September 16, 2012 by Hilander

[+ouija ouija]

But Salman Rushdie is a Muslim! He converted when the fatwa was first issued(which to me seemed like adding insult to injury), to try and appease Ayatollah Khomeini and his chums.

[questionmark]

But Salman Rushdie is a Muslim! He converted when the fatwa was first issued(which to me seemed like adding insult to injury), to try and appease Ayatollah Khomeini and his chums.

I don't know where you got that from, but Rushdie was born into a Muslim family of Kashmiri origin, he did not convert. his fathers name was Ahmed and Salman is his given name.

Edited September 16, 2012 by questionmark

[+ouija ouija]

I don't know where you got that from, but Rushdie was born into a Muslim family of Kashmiri origin, he did not convert. his fathers name was Ahmed and Salman is his given name.

I just remember it from news bulletins at the time he was in hiding. It stuck in my mind because, like I said, it seemed such an obvious sham, done for no other reason than appeasement.

[+ouija ouija]

This is from Wikipedia: Rushdie came from a Muslim family though he is an atheist now. In 1990, in the "hope that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him," he issued a statement claiming he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam in his novel and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world. However, Rushdie later said that he was only "pretending".^[64]

^{So, not quite as I remembered. The man's a fool and it's outrageous that he received a knighthood ...... shows you how meaningless they are.}

Edited September 16, 2012 by ouija ouija

[zebra99]

For an ugly git he's had his fair share of good looking women...him and Lembit Opik have definitely had my share.And both have had a big chunk of taxpayers money to aid their lifestyle.

[Super-Fly]

So there offering money for him dead?

Seems legit...

Thanks,

[+ouija ouija]

It won't happen. They just feel really big issuing fatwas .......... as if they meant something!

[+and-then]

It won't happen. They just feel really big issuing fatwas .......... as if they meant something!

Yes but it has effectively sentenced him to prison for decades. What he needs is his own personal drone strike on his tormenters to show them what it's like

[questionmark]

in related news:

'I Insist on the Right to Freedom of Expression'

For over a decade, author Salman Rushdie had to live in hiding from Muslim extremists intent on assassinating him in accordance with an Iranian fatwa. SPIEGEL spoke with Rushdie about the trying experience and why he has now chosen to write about it in his new memoir.

Read full interview

[hetrodoxly]

This is from Wikipedia: Rushdie came from a Muslim family though he is an atheist now. In 1990, in the "hope that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him," he issued a statement claiming he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam in his novel and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world. However, Rushdie later said that he was only "pretending".^[64]

^{So, not quite as I remembered. The man's a fool and it's outrageous that he received a knighthood ...... shows you how meaningless they are.}

Why is he a fool?

[+ouija ouija]

Why is he a fool?

For 1) thinking that renewing his faith would appease those who had issued the fatwa, and 2) for then saying he was 'only pretending' .... both actions simply added insult to the (perceived), injury of 'The Satanic Verses'. For an educated man with close connections to Muslims he behaved extremely foolishly

Edited September 22, 2012 by ouija ouija

[RonPrice]

SALMON RUSHDIE AND MORE MEMOIRES

Part 1:

Salmon Rushdie(1947- ) is back in the news as the above thread here at Unexplained Mysteries Discussion Forums informs us. I'm going to post several pieces I've written about him over the years, for the possible interest of readers. My post below is somewhat long, and outside the conventions of short posts here; readers are advised to skim or scan or just not bother reading what follows.-Ron Price, Tasmania, My website is at the following url, if you'd prefer to read some of my other pieces on other subjects: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/

--------------------------------------------------

Part 1:

Death threats were made against Rushdie including a fatwā requiring his execution which was proclaimed on Radio Tehran. The fatwa was issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989. I was just settling in to the first year of my final decade as a FT lecturer in a technical college in Western Australia; 1989 was also my first year as the secretary of a local Baha’i community in a suburb of Perth, Belmont, beside the Swan River. I was immersed in the task of dealing with 100 students a week, and serving as a secretary of a Baha’i group of some 30 or more in a wider Perth Baha’i community at the time of some 1500 Baha’is. I was up-to-my-ears in a 60 to 80 hour week of wall-to-wall people.

The news of Mr Rushdie in 1989 was just an on-air bit of information to add to the many other happenings reported that day by the electronic and print media such as: (i) heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson’s divorce in the Dominican Republic, (ii) Union Carbide’s agreement to pay $470 million damages for Bhopol disaster, and (iii) the placing of the world's 1st satellite, the first of 24 satellites, of a Global Positioning System into orbit.

1989 was a very big year on the global agenda. In the midst of everything else happening that year, from Tiananmen Square to the fall of the Berlin Wall, I didn't dream that the forces underlying this remote anti-Rushdie event far-out on the periphery of my psyche and of western civilization would eventually come to define our era in so many ways. At the time, the Rushdie affair just seemed to me like some weird historical sideshow as I ploughed through the all-consuming tasks that made-up my week. I had a few hours left-over to give to: my wife and kids, a few friends, my daily-walk and other activity to keep body-and-soul together so that I might enjoy my 64 hours a week of rest and sleep---in order to get back to the 100 hours involved in getting through my weekly tasks.

Part 2:

The following decade was an all-consuming one for Rushdie who was in the belly of some beast that I watched, heard or read about, but only on the rare occasion, safely from my observation tower half a world away occupied, as I say above, with my own life’s all-consuming agenda. Rushdie has just published a new book which takes us inside that whale-of-a-beast for that decade of the 1990s. The new book is his memoir, Joseph Anton, and it’s about his living-in-hiding for more than a decade. Filled with cameos by everyone from Bill Clinton to Christopher Hitchens to Warren Beatty, this literary page-turner, as one reviewer describes it, tells us in fascinating detail, says the same reviewer, what it means to have every aspect of your life overturned. Not all the reviews and reviewers thusfar have been fascinated and captivated. Check them out to get that balanced view the media is so concerned about---at least in some cases.

In September 2012 Iran seized on widespread Muslim outrage over a film insulting the Prophet Mohammad to revive the death threat against Salman Rushdie, raising the reward for killing him by US$500,000 (£320,000). This should really help the sales of the book, I thought to myself, and Rushdie is going to need his minders again--big time.

The ayatollah's death sentence meant that Rushdie had to choose a new, non-Asian identity. He did. He called himself Joseph Anton, a name which came from combining the first names of two famous writers: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. He also had to adjust to live-in bodyguards and having to ask permission to do the simplest things, like meeting his son. More than Rushdie’s literary output, the death sentence against him turned the author into an international celebrity. In recent years, Rushdie himself has become a fixture on the New York social scene, with a reputation for keeping the company of glamorous women half his age.

Part 3:

Some readers, drawing parallels with the recent tabloidization of Rushdie’s own life, may cringe at how much his memoir peddles in publishing-world gossip, but like the author himself, Joseph Anton is an amalgam of high and low, salaciousness and profundity. As he has before, Rushdie proves himself a master at straddling the boundary between supermarket romance and philosophical treatise. The long rite of affairs and betrayals and divorces can’t obscure the fact that this is, ultimately, a wise book about some of the most important issues affecting the world today.

Foremost among those issues are the causes of free speech and free expression. Rushdie is an absolutist on these issues, arguing that free speech amounts to “life itself.” He suggests that the attempt by radical Islam to stifle The Satanic Verses was really the opening salvo in an ongoing conflict that has continued through the rise of al-Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The seeds of intolerance sown in 1989, when Khomeini’s fatwa was passed, have sprouted into a far more general—and violent—conflict between militant Islam and Western culture. Rushdie quotes the German poet Heinrich Heine: “Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.”¹

He insists on complexity and nuance where polemic and cliché so often reign. This is what writers do. And this, ultimately, is Rushdie’s triumph. In an age of rising intolerance and diminished literary confidence, Joseph Anton—like Rushdie’s own life—strikes a blow for the continued relevance of literature.¹–Ron Price with thanks to ¹Akash Kapur, Book Review: 'Joseph Anton' by Salman Rushdie, in The Stack on October 04, 2012

We each have our own memoirs;

why I’ve got mine on 1000s of

pages and all over the internet, &

most people have them up in their

heads; others, still, are placing some

of their story on Facebook & twitter.

To each their own as we each tell our

story to others and to ourselves before

our final story goes before those pearly

gates, & we go into a hole for those who

tell no more story…….at least not here!

I won’t be reading your story, Salmon,

in its 600+ pages…..There are just too

many stories: cyberspace-&-real space.

There are stories in the humanities & social

sciences, the physical, biological, & applied

sciences and the result is an image-&-print

glut that keeps everyone busy working out

their own agenda. You’ve certainly had more

than your share, more than your 15 minutes of

fame, as old Andy once put it long ago in the '60s.

Andy was popular among all those hippies who

were starting to make their mark on civilization

and who are now heading into old-age. I wish

you well, dear Salmon, as you too head into

old-age writing, as you have been doing for

decades: another hippy who has made his

mark on global civilization, at least to some.

Ron Price

10/10/’12

-------------------------------------------------------------

REALLY REAL

I wrote these two short paragraphs in my first month after retiring from FT paid-employment with 50 years in classrooms under my belt, 1949-1999, and after listening to an interview this morning with Salmon Rushdie.¹ The interview and Rushdie’s words made me think about the pioneer in so many walks of life. He or she should strive, as far as possible, to create home where it did not exist before wherever they go. But this is not always easy work. In a city like Perth with over a thousand Baha’is I found there were pockets, groups, of Baha’is I was never at home with.

Virtually all pioneers wherever they are found, it seems to me, are not able to ‘remove strangeness.’¹ There is always some sense of not belonging. The pioneer is in the position, Salmon Rushdie describes having two dreams: rootedness and journeying. He refers to people having two needs: community and group identity, as well as individuality and transcendence.² –Ron Price with thanks to: ¹Salmon Rushdie, “Arts Today: Interview”, ABC Radio National, 3 May 1999, 9-10:00 a.m.; and ²Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, Four on an Island, Oxford, 1983, p. 62.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

RUSHDIE and ME

A week after I retired from full-time work as a teacher and lecturer, after 32 years in the classroom and another 18 as a student, the website CNN Entertainment published an article entitled: “Rushdie’s new book out from under shadow of fatwa.”¹ The book referred to was The Ground Beneath her Feet and it was about a completely different world than that of his 1988 book The Satanic Verses. The new world of Rushdie’s 1999 book was: rock ‘n roll music, New York and the crossover cultures between the east and the west

Rushdie, an Indian-born novelist, in 1999 was still getting used to a more visible life. A decade before, in 1989, Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a death edict against him for allegedly blaspheming Islam in that book The Satanic Verses. Khomeini died soon afterward, but Rushdie had to go into hiding for nearly a decade. It wasn’t until September 1998 that Tehran disassociated itself from Khomeini’s edict, as part of a deal aimed at restoring full diplomatic relations with Britain.-Ron Price with thanks to ¹the website CNN Entertainment, 15 April 1999.

Your book is a variation on the Orpheus/Eurydice

myth with rock music replacing the Orpheus lyre.

The myth works as a red thread from which you

sometimes stray, but to which you attach endless

references. You gave us a sort of report on life at

the end of the 20^th century….I was far too busy to

read it getting-out from under 50 years of those

classrooms, Baha’i responsibilities in the big-city

and ready to take a sea-change from many jobs.

Your book provided a background and an alternate

history to those ‘50s to ‘90s period of rock music’s

growth….You give us, the reviewers said, humour

in a predictable unpredictability, a rat-tat-tat pace.

For clear shots of insight into the human condition

and the universe as it might be, you always moved

the ground beneath our feet.² …So perhaps during

these years of my sea-change, at 55+++, I may just

finally get ‘into’ you---but only time will tell since I

have had to recreate my life-style….my entire MO.³

¹ On 10 May 1999, six hundred people attended a reading and book signing of author Salman Rushdie’s new book The Ground Beneath Her Feet. –Zarminae Ansari, “Salmon Rushdie’s “rock and roll” novel,” The Tech: Online Edition, 4 June 1999. By June 1999 I had finished marking the last pieces, scripts, papers, I was given after my classroom teaching had come to an end.

² Linda L. Richards, “The Earth Moves,” January Magazine, April 1999.

³ modus operandi is a Latin expression used in who-dun-its. It means method of operating or way of going about things.

Ron Price

14 November 2011

--------------------------------------------

SWIRLING

When I was working in a tin mine on the west coast of Tasmania in 1981/2 at one of the dirtiest, but emotionally challenging, jobs I’ve ever had, Salmon Rushdie was catapulted to literary fame. I think I may have come across his name on the morning news before going to work on the bus in this little town on the west coast of Tasmania where it just about always rained. I got on the bus early in the morning in the dark and the rain for, as I say and just to reiterate, it nearly always rained on the west coast of this beautiful island state of Australia. News of Rushdie and his Midnight’s Children(1981) was the beginning of his story in the narrative that is my own life and, over twenty-five years later, I still follow the writing and life of this acclaimed and controversial writer.

Yesterday I listened to an interview on ABC radio¹ with this Indian-British novelist and essayist, this Muslim-born and self-proclaimed atheist around whom have been swirling literary and political issues, especially since the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses(1988). I had left the tin mine by 1988 and was living in what is arguably the most isolated city on the planet, Perth, Western Australia. The comparisons and contrasts between Rushdie’s writing and mine I found helped to place my own work in a useful personal perspective. This prose-poem is just one of a series of pieces which examines these comparisons and contrasts.-Ron Price with thanks to “The Book Show,” ABC Radio National, 21 April 2008, 10:05-11:00 a.m.

I tell stories, too, Salmon

but I don’t draw on the

deficit model of history¹

in the same way as you.

I, too, subvert linear history

with spacial, sacred, circular

and fragmented models, far

more transnational, not the

discreet national-local story

here, more the flickering film

of a phenomenal world where

a sense of unity is demanding

fulfilment on a tide of desire

for an outward and political

form mounting to a flood, to

a climax in these tempestuous

times of troubles and woes.

Writing for me was a second

choice, too, Salmon, after I

realized I could not make a

career of baseball and life

wore me out with 40 years,

endless talking & listening

among other slings-arrows

of life’s outrageous fortune.

¹Camilla Nelson, “ Faking It: History and Creative Writing,” TEXT: Vol. 11, No.2, 2007.

Ron Price

22 April 2008

-------------------------

end of document

[+ouija ouija]

I read it all ^ ^ ^ !

[RonPrice]

I offer you my congratulations,

ouija ouija.............Ron

[RoofGardener]

How about this ?

Each time some foaming-at-the-brain Muslim makes death threats - whether or not they are couched as formal Fatwas - we assassinate them ?

If assassinating them would be too difficult, we send in elements of the Royal Navy to bombard all of the Republican Guard naval facilities in the Gulf of Persia. And if we run out of RG facilities, we start on the dockyards, especially those used for trans-shipping oil ?

And then, when we've run out of dockyards, we start shore bombardment of Iranian coastal air-defence facilities.

And then, when we've run out of ADF's, we send the RAF in to bomb facilities further and further inland.Including Tehran.

Perhaps THEN the Iranian Muslims would learn to THINK before they open their mouths and scream out death threats.

[+and-then]

How about this ?

Each time some foaming-at-the-brain Muslim makes death threats - whether or not they are couched as formal Fatwas - we assassinate them ?

If assassinating them would be too difficult, we send in elements of the Royal Navy to bombard all of the Republican Guard naval facilities in the Gulf of Persia. And if we run out of RG facilities, we start on the dockyards, especially those used for trans-shipping oil ?

And then, when we've run out of dockyards, we start shore bombardment of Iranian coastal air-defence facilities.

And then, when we've run out of ADF's, we send the RAF in to bomb facilities further and further inland.Including Tehran.

Perhaps THEN the Iranian Muslims would learn to THINK before they open their mouths and scream out death threats.

Wait... wouldn't that be the act of an Islamophobe? Actually it makes too much sense to ever be done by our leaders.

[acute]

I read it all ^ ^ ^ !

I'm waiting for the Reader's Digest version.

[RonPrice]

I've given some thought to these and other historical questions on my website at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/HISTORY.html ....Read as much or as little as you so desire. the page begins as follows:

My website on the subject of history divides this ancient discipline of study into: classical, medieval and modern, three separate sub-divisions and three separate webpages. This introductory section, this particular webpage, on the subject of history also includes: (a) interdisciplinary studies, & ( economics--toward the end of this page. Readers wanting to examine my opening remarks on the subject of economics &/or interdisciplinary studies need to scroll-down here many pages. When this 4th edition of my website was in the planning phase more than four years ago my website design company and I divided the field of knowledge into more than 80 sub-divisions. I did not include economics or inter-disciplinary studies at the time, and so have added these two fields of study in the four years since this 4th edition of my website "went live", as they say, 21/3/'11.

Historian E. J. Hobsbawn(1917-2012) was a British Marxist historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism, and nationalism. His best-known works include his trilogy about the long 19th century: The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 andThe Age of Empire: 1875–1914). He also wrote The Age of Extremes on the short 20th century, and an edited volume which introduced the influential idea of "invented traditions". Hobsbawn saw “human history as an ascent, rather than a decline or an undulating movement about a level trend.” He offered his contribution to a critique of nostalgia; he dismissed any critique of the present that was non-progressive: "Compared to these relatively coherent ideologies of progress, those of resistance to progress hardly deserve the name of systems of thought. For more on Hobsbawn go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm-----------------------