Islam

The new Islamist attempt to assassinate Salman Rushdie reminded me that years ago, the Egyptian-German scholar Hamed Abdel-Samad told Rushdie, at a 30th-anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa ordering Rushdie’s assassination, “30 years ago, there was a Salman Rushdie in the world, today there is at least one Salman Rushdie in every Islamic country, not to mention those in Western countries.”

In 2012, Al-Qaeda published a list of critics of Islam as “most wanted” targets for assassination. Networks of Islamist websites today call for the assassination of extensive lists of infidels and “apostates” around the world. Some have already been killed, others silenced, and almost all live under police protection.

That’s a very long list.

The attack on Salman Rushdie reminds us once again of the difference between Islam and other religions.  In response to the publication of The Satanic Verses, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death fatwa in 1989 against Rushdie which resulted in attacks on two translators, one publisher, and a massacre at a hotel in Turkey.

Thirty years after the issuance of the fatwa, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made it clear that the fatwa was still in effect; and two weeks ago, a Muslim man heeded the call and attacked Rushdie as he was about to deliver a talk at an event in Chautauqua, New York.  Rushdie was stabbed 15 times and severely wounded.

Even the savagery of the ‘ISIS Beatles’ is already being forgotten.

On 11 September 2011, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, there was a mass brawl outside a pub in Marble Arch in London. A bunch of boozed-up members of the English Defence League had a run-in with Muslim youths. It was depicted as typical EDL ugliness. As one eye-witness described it to the Evening Standard, the ‘EDL guys’ were drinking outside the pub ‘when a large group of Muslims walked past’. The EDL thugs ‘started hurling racist abuse at the Muslims, who took offence’. ‘[The Muslims] got angry’, the eye-witness said, ‘and were yelling back’. Things escalated and two EDL members were stabbed.

We must stifle our fears about Rushdie

Christians of convenience are nothing new. As early as the second century, the sect-hopping Peregrinus milked Christians for money and fame, until they found out he was eating food sacrificed to pagan idols. But there is something shocking about the “Catholic revival” driven by downtown New York scenesters — that is, the phenomenon of attractive, highly social ketamine enthusiasts saying they are Catholic.