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Why I am delighted Salman Rushdie has been knighted I for one was delighted when I heard Salman Rushdie was going to be knighted… which might sound odd given that I regard the puffed up popinjay as a caricature of the very worst traits of the ‘meejah’ class, truly an example of how the empty vessel makes the most noise (though I cannot fault his taste in crumpet).
But the fact UKGov did something that was so obviously going to put one in the eye of the Islamists is a good think in and of itself regardless. Like the Mohammed cartoons incident and its aftermath, the reaction across the Muslim world to this serves as a very useful reminder that the ‘moderate Islam’ is a myth (for a superb account of this ‘from the inside’, I recommend Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and that not only helps in the battle against intolerant Islam directly, it helps in the culture war closer to home against Islam’s host of useful idiots in the western world.
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If we’re recommending books, can I add in The Islamist? I picked it up at the airport flying out to Dubai. It shows why “moderate” Islam isn’t, and is written by someone who’s been out to the extreme, and has come back.
If your opponent is quick to anger, seek to irritate him.
In retaliation: Sir Osama Bin Laden.
This is quite illustrative. They think a mass murderer is equivalent to an author dully insulting their religion.
I am also delighted (if a little concerned for his own safety).
Apparently the committee that nominated him were ‘completely taken by surprise by the reaction of the Muslim community’.
You do have to wonder where some people have been the last 5 years.
Pompous and irritating the man may be, but I think he’s a helluva writer. And why shouldn’t the UK knight him. It’s no business of anyone else. I happen to know a man who wears socks with sandals but I dont call down a fatwah on him:)
Good-o, anything that causes the members of the oompah to seethe and whine should be repeated weekly in the hopes of causing their little pin heads to explode.
Keep doing it on telly too morons; makes it easier for the sane among us to point out the inherent evil of islam.
Maybe I have mellowed a bit, but I don’t find Rushie the least bit irritating as a public persona although I used to do so. On the whole, he annoys people who deserve to be annoyed. He was interviewed by Reason magazine not long ago and he seems to be a decent guy.
Comment I left on the Telegraph site, in respect to their suggestion that if Pakistan is so offended they could always repay the aid we give them.
Umm,
Why should Pakistan return anything? It is a component of Sharia that the non Muslim pay the Jizya tax/tribute to the Muslim.
The alternative, of course, is war. Not only does Pakistan have an absolute right to the tribute we pay, but if we don’t pay they are entitled to come and get it.
According to Sharia.
There is very little real understanding of just what Islam is, what it isn’t is a religion like any other. When dealing with this lot all our assumptions about what is and what isn’t a rational approach just get knocked into a cocked hat.
Under Islamic law we really do have an obligation to give them money, because they are Muslim, and we are not.
On the Moderate Muslim situation I think you are mistaken. They aren’t rioting in Qatar. Or Yemen, or Indonesia, or Thailand, or Jordan, or any number of places. Pakistan is a bit of a hot bed of immoderation. There really are a LOT of Muslims in the world. Sure, the moderate ones should speak out louder, but there are plenty that have not lost their minds.
I don’t find Rushdie irritating either, although I have mixed feelings about his writing. But this just doesn’t matter.
The fatwah on Rushdie was an outrage. (It was, sadly, an indication of what was coming, also). Many people on both the left and the right were rather limp wristed in defending him, and that also was an indication of what was coming. In the 1990s, I heard lots of seemingly sensible people say things like “Well, Rushdie shouldn’t be killed, but this was at least party his own fault”. I thought this position was codswallop at the time, but I should have been harsher on the people who said it than I was at the time.
My impression is he’s a much nicer man than he was pre-fatwa, though that might just be age.
The Satanic Verses is itself rather good on Islamism, the minor character who is based on Khomeni being very persuasive.
In the same vein, there is a novel written in the early 90s called Fatima’s Scarf by David Caute, inspired by the Bradford book-burners. Interestingly no publisher could be found for it, despite Mr Caute being a well-thought-of writer represented by one of the top agents, and the author eventually had to publish it himself.
Terri,
I hate to disillusion you. They may not be rioting in Thailand or Indonesia, but they are certainly murdering children for the crime of not being Muslims, or, in the case of girls, for being Muslims and still having the effrontery to go to school.
A group of Islamic clerics in Pakistan have indeed awarded O.B.L. the “Sword of Allah” award.
But what percentage of the 150 million plus Muslims in Pak agree with them? I do not know.
I do not even know what percentage of Muslims in the United Kingdom agree with them.
I remember (from my guarding days) that Muslims guards used to show me, via their mobile telephones, various westerners getting their heads removed. But that could be just normal sadism (rather than religous belief), after all I am not Muslim and I was not shocked or upset by the sight (although I was not really interested either). And I can hardly claim that security guards are a typical example of the population (they are always tired and depressed).
As for Sir Salmon Rushdie himself:
I know little of his work (my mother bought a book of his many years ago – but I did not read it and do not know where it is). However, he seems to have a decent sense of humour.
I remember him saying that it was embarrassing for a leftist like himself to owe his life to the British “secret police” and that it was ever more embarrassing that (after all the years he had got to know them) some of these secret police were now his closest friends.
These words took me back to the 1980’s (my own time on the edges of this world). For all the mistakes and missed chances (with such things as the Thatcher revolt never really being what it could have been – and even the lady herself being betrayed in the end) they were good days.
I wonder if Sir Salmon will ever bring himself to say somthing nice about Mrs T. herself, perhaps he already has done.
Talking of the myth of moderate Muslims, did anyone see Shirley Williams on Question Time? She said that even the “moderate” Muslims in her party were offended by what Rushdie has written. You just can’t make this stuff up, etc. Actually even Rushdie couldn’t make up the Libdems, they are so unbelievably bad.
Kev,
Just watched that segment of Question Time over the net, I found Christopher Hitchens telling Shirley her views were contemptible to be absolutely delightful.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
– Sen Barry Goldwater
Kev,
Just watched that segment of Question Time over the net, I found Christopher Hitchens telling Shirley her views were contemptible to be absolutely delightful.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
– Sen Barry Goldwater
Well, I think Salman Rushdie is a decent sort. His atheistic schtick is vastly less grating than Prof Dawkins. He’s a bit of a lefty but hell, that’s his own look-out ain’t it? It’s also very useful in a way because it shows the left that the Islamists are coming to get them too. We’re gonna turn the corner on this one when the left leaves off hating America so much that it sees the real elephant on the landing. The left/Islamist convergence has got to be a short-lived weirdness hasn’t it? Let’s all be in favour of gay marriage and then when they’re decently married let’s decently stone ’em just doesn’t fly does it? Well it doesn’t make any bloody sense.
Paul,
Clearly you’re made of sterner stuff than me. I suspect I would have been somewhat disconcerted being shown a video of a decapitation. Why don’t these people download porn like decent folk? OK, that’s flippant but it hides a very deep truth. Our enemy thinks nothing of showing some poor sod having their head sawed off but goes mental over a girl wearing jeans and a T-shirt. One of those is everyday normal and the other is obscene and hideous. Me and the Ayatollahs can agree on that. We just fail to agree on which way round to apply the labels.
Chris Harper,
Technically jizya is the price you pay to be a dhimmi in a muslim country. I’m not sure if it has any real application to inter-state aid. Something that has emerged in recent years (to my great astonishment) is the extent to which the Islamic world regards the West as unalloyed Christian. The MoToons of Doom intifada provoked much comment along the lines of “You shouldn’t insult our holy figures because we don’t insult your Jesus…” It’s quite, quite weird and results in the likes of Al-Zawahari making a bonkers speech about how the Queen is a foremost enemy of Islam. I assume this is because she’s head of the Church of England and the Crusades never ended. My surcoat’s in the wash so I’m gonna have to pass on raiding Al Quds this time around. That Saracen blood is a devil to lift and I’m allergic to biological powder.
Perry,
Yes, I do appreciate Sir Salman has a taste for the ladies. Are you suggesting that his knighthood should be for something other than services to literature? I mean, he’s an inspiration to us all. If a guy who looks like Rushdie can pull a hottie then…
A link perchance? I was oblivious to the fact the Hitch was on Question Time.
Andrew,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/default.stm?survey=no&url=news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/default.stm&site=sitelabel&js=yes&uid=f4d6542fde7c6e47356460662040b178334e0c48d0b060e36b0a25149d07fef5
Chris Hitchens, Peter Hitchins, Shirley Williams and Boris Johnson all on the one program.
Should have been priceless, but it was merely ok.
I think Hitchens, C. savaging Williams over her equivocal support for Rushdie and the studio audience for agreeing with her was worth seeing. Don’t usually get much aggression on QT, and the dim vox pop element keeps its temperature low.
Taqqiyah 101 for Shirley Williams: if the “moderate” Muslims in your “party” are “offended” by the work of Salman Rushdie, that means they’re not actually “moderate”.
Technically jizya is the price you pay to be a dhimmi in a muslim country.
True, but non muslim polities can buy peace by paying tribute, achieving dhimmi status but remaining nominally independent, or at least unoccupied.
I realise this isn’t technically jizya, but it seemd like a good analogy.
Not necessarily; it means they are idiots if they purport to be offended without knowledge of the books, or if they don’t grasp the concept of fiction. It tells you nothing about their other views.
I think if you were one of Rushdie’s satyrical targets, you might reasonably be offended, particularly if you thought the criticism were wrong. Or you might find the views expressed repugnant or incidents portrayed tastless. People are perfectly entitled to be offended. (There are plenty of novels and examples of other fictional forms I find offensive because of the content or subtext.)
They are even entitled to be offended by the knighthood, though that is a very strange second hand sort of offence. If other people acclaim work you don’t like, then you might well find it irritating they are so wrong. (That sort of offense we take all the time round here, and if you are of a minority opinion you might as well get used to it.)
What they aren’t entitled to do is to suggest that their offense or potential offense justifies the suppression of other people’s legitimate activities. Where Williams was outrageously out of line was in suggesting that the accolade ought not to take place because it might be forseen to proke ostentatious annoyance from some Muslims. She was suggesting, in effect, that the value system of some noisy fanatics ought to prevail over that of others (and to the extent that honours are supposed to represent the country, over that of Britain as a whole), merely because they take offence.
Given that almost anything can be demonstrated to be deeply offensive to some group or another, the policy of avoiding offense at all costs is potentially a dangerous one. I have frequently toyed with founding a religion with strict dietary rules against lamb, chicken beans and brassica, in order to sow terror among the organisers of public functions.
“…is potentially a dangerous one, in its own terms.” I should have written. I’m not advocating tolerance because it is safer. Quite the reverse.
Seriously pursued tolerance (otherwise known as libertarianism) is not popular. It is however right.
Ah the pantomime Dame ! dont you just love her!!
She used to look like an accident in a wind tunnel, now she looks like she is taking fashion hints from Miss Marple.
Dont be to hard on the poor woman. After all it cant be much fun going through your whole life getting everything 180 degrees wrong.
She ended up by saying that she thought the timing unfortunate. Hitchens C slipped “Some other time’s ok then?”
Yes Dame Shirley, when will be the appropriate time to award the man an honour that meets the approval of Islamofascists??
Shit for brains, just like Tony Benn. But there they are, regulars on programmes like Question Time, still hawking their old failed visions of the future, and because their old, the British public goes –
Ah Bless!! let’s indulge them!!!
I for one, would second Boris’s suggestion of a Knighthood for George Macdonald Fraser.
Rushdie’s knighthood illuminated a very scary situation: that Europeans (a certain Lord in particular) are ready to throw away their freedom of expression to appease the homocidal crazies.
It’s instructive to compare the public’s reaction to The Da Vinci Code with its reaction to Satanic Verses. The publication of Rushdie’s book resulted in mass protests and rioting (which caused the death of a bunch of people, who were, presumably, trampled by the angry crowd), a fatwa, and the assassination of Rushdie’s Japanese editor.
I am also delighted (if a little concerned for his own safety).
Apparently the committee that nominated him were ‘completely taken by surprise by the reaction of the Muslim community’.
You do have to wonder where some people have been the last 5 years.
Posted by pommygranate at June 21, 2007 02:10
i wonder if said committee might have been hoping this actually might have pleased at least some muslims…?
They aren’t rioting in Qatar.
They were when the Motoons came out. I drove straight through the middle of a protest in which death threats were being chanted and flags being burned.
If you want to see moderate Islam in pratice, go to Kazan, the capital of the Russian republic of Tatarstan. The Muslims there drink, gamble, eat pork, shag who they please, then stop at the mosque to pray.
Tim,
The Muslims there drink, gamble, eat pork, shag who they please, then stop at the mosque to pray.
Which by my understanding doesn’t really make them muslim any more than I’m a Christian just because I was brought up in a nation with a broadly Christian heritage.
Just because they have a culture influenced by Islam doesn’t make ’em muslim any more than just because I share in a culture influenced by Christianity I ever even considered the idea of, say, pre-marital sex sinful. Bloody hell, I don’t even consider anything sinful in absolute terms! Culture does not equal religion. I suspect the bin Ladens of this world would wanna kill those Tartars even more than they wanna kill you or me.
Which by my understanding doesn’t really make them muslim any more than I’m a Christian…
They’re muslims all right, even if their version practiced is more relaxed than that in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. I am uncomfortable with the idea of protraying the Tatars as not muslim simply because they do not adopt a fundamentalist approach to their religion. This is the exact argument the fundamentalists use to ensure that the only acceptable kind of Islam is the fundamentalist kind.
I have almost boundless contempt for Shirley Williams and her ilk and even lesser sub- and derivative ilks.
The Shirleys of this world needs to be confronted with their irrationality and duplicity on a regular basis.
p.s. Boris description of Lib Dems dribbling for red boxes and power was absolutely spot on.
Tim Newman,
Nah, I don’t buy that. The Koran is fairly specific on a number of things these folk seem to be violating with gay abandon. You’re reminding me of the Bishop of Durham who a coupla decades back said he thought the virgin birth was a myth and the resurrection dubious.
Similarly I regard myself as an agnostic and not an ultra-liberal Christian. Because I suppose I could by the same token be an ultra-liberal anything.
PS. Nick M = n
Not all the Shirleys of the world induce censure.
I knew a lovely girl from Africa. She worked in a pub, and once we got friendly she’d slip me free Tetleys over the counter.
One day she sat at the pub piano.
“Give us a tune!” said one old geyser.
So she did.
An entire Mozart Piano Concerto from memory.
Married some other guy.
Bummer.
RAB: “Ah the pantomime Dame !” Surely that should be “pantomime Dhimmi?”
Anyway, the good thing about knighting the likes of Salman is that acts like this reveal the real thinking of the Muslims, so exposing their hatreds and ambitions eventually obliges even the clots who run the country to take notice.
“*Gasp* You mean, they aren’t the religion of peace, after all?”
RAB (and Boris Johnson) have informed me that George MacDonald Fraser does not have a Knighthood.
I assumed that he was a Knight of the Realm, not just because of his works but because of the sort of wonderful man he is.
It is hard to believe he is not a Kight. Still in the eyes of God (and, I suspect, the Queen) George MacDonald Fraser is a Knight.
Worth a read. Irshad Manji writes in The Australian about the Salman Rushdie knighthood and its effects in the Islamic world.
“The irrational response to Salman Rushdie’s knighthood is sadly typical.”
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21940050-7583,00.html
The lady mentions that people are right to complain about the “mistreatment” of Muslim prisoners at Gitmo (the place where the inmates special meals cost three times more, each, than the meals of the guards), perhaps Irshad Manji does not know about the condition in ordinary prisons (i.e. the prisons where people who have not made deals with the authorities go) in both the United States and Pakistan.
I would rather go to Gitmo than to an ordinary prison in either the United States or Pakistan.
Full disclusure, I am an ex Civil Servant of the Prison Service (from the days when it was part of the Home Office) and I fully accept that own prisons have in recent years started to go if for the same modern fads (drugs, gangs, homosexual rape, ….) that have taken over American prisons – although we are still not as far down the road of “progress” as they are.
For those who will say “prisons have always been like that” I would reply with the old Russian saying “first they smash your face in, and then they say you were always ugly”.
In short, no prisons have not always been like this.
I think all this carry on clouds the fact that the honours system should be abolished and that the state should not be handing out awards to any author.
And while I agree that its none of the Arab world’s business, it is rather hypocritical hearing any government minister say that considering all the meddling we get up to in the Arab world.
I think you’re missing one critical distinction between Guantanamo Bay and, say, United States Pennitentiary-Terre Haute (home of the Federal death row) or USP-Florence (home of the famed “Supermax”).
The Government’s reason for holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay was to place them beyond the reach of any court. The reasoning was, they are now outside the jurisdiction of any Federal District court, and therefore cannot petition a civilian court to review the legality of their being held.
In other words, the President wanted them in a position where their captors are also to be the same entity as the “judge” who adjudicates the legality of their seizure. (For all those who talk about the impartiality of the JAG corps, let me point out that the Judge Advocates General are all uniformed officers, strictly subordinate to a chain of command terminating at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And that this President has articulated a theory called the “Unitary Executive” which AIUI means that he is the executive branch, and everybody else is just his hands and feet and eyes and so on. Therefore, by his own reasoning nobody else in his branch is independent.)
Anybody who doesn’t see the same problem here, imagine if I arrested you for whatever. Then imagine if, because of some special provision of law, I didn’t have to present you to an actual court “without undue delay” but could instead ask the guy in the next cubicle to rule on the legality of the arrest and your continued detention.
This is why I tolerate the ACLU: For every horseshit lawsuit they file about creche scenes at Christmas and whether or not the penis-to-vagina ratio in this squadroom is satisfactory, there’s some legitimate issue like the fundamental question of whether or not a person held in custody has a right to demand to be brought before the court.
(Not that I have a strong opinion here, or anything…)
Drugs, gangs and homosexual rape are hardly innovations in prison or indeed anywhere else.
I seem to recall they turn up in the Bible.
Bring back The Crank and the Oubliette!
And for repeat offenders the Pear of Anguish.
Pear of Anguish?
For bringing that up, Nick, I sentence you to a fine Italian meal.
While watching “Hannibal.”
Surrounded by firefighters. UNMARRIED firefighters.
It was either that, or giving you the Peach of Moderate Annoyance.
Sunfish,
I enjoy Italian food.
I’m not sure about the fire-brigade. Is that a reference to me being buggered senseless by brawny men. Well you never know – I might realize something I’ve been supressing all these years… It would certainly explain the why I’ve got Charlene’s “Never Been to Me” on my HD.
But Hannibal… Oh that’s cruel. That’s cruel and unusual and as one of America’s finest, sworn to uphold the constitution you surely know that you shouldn’t make threats like that.
I saw it at the cinema and that’s a couple of hours I’m never getting back. To paraphrase from a film I did like, it was not over quickly and I did not enjoy it.
And for that alone I gift you the pineapple of mild anxiety. Sideways 😉
Question: who was most pantomimishly over-acting: Oldman or Hopkins?
Actually, it was just a reference to the fact that firefighters will eat things loaded with tomato sauce immediately after dealing with gore. Indelicate, I tell you. Nothing at all like cops, who are all refined and dignified.
Now you’re talking like the guy who wants the Tangerine of Inconvenience.
You two are both begging for the Saguaro of serenity.
Did someone say “indelicate”?