The American MSM Silence On Muslim Craziness On Rushdie

[Annie]

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-rutten23jun23,1,2535413.column?ctrack=2&cset=true

REGARDING MEDIA / TIM RUTTEN
Where is the West's outcry?
Tim Rutten
Regarding Media

June 23, 2007

FOR a writer, Salman Rushdie has had a rather turbulent career.

Even by his standards, however, this has been quite a week for the Indian-born, British-educated Booker Prize-winning novelist, now a resident of New York:

Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for services to literature, he turned 60, and, across the Muslim world, a variety of jihad-minded fanatics and their essentially mindless apologists renewed their demand that Rushdie be murdered as soon as possible.

The Islamicists' antipathy toward Rushdie goes back 19 years, to when his fanciful novel "The Satanic Verses" was deemed by some of them to blaspheme Muhammad. There was a great deal of rioting and fulminating at the time, culminating in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's pronouncement of a fatwa against Rushdie. As the Iranian revolution's spiritual leader said on Tehran radio, "The author of 'The Satanic Verses,' which is against Islam, the Prophet, the Koran and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death."

Rushdie survived by spending the better part of the next decade in what amounted to an "author's protection program" maintained by the British government. Several of his translators, however, were killed or wounded.

When news of knighthood spread last weekend, the flames of fanaticism rekindled. An Iranian group offered $150,000 to anyone who would murder the novelist. Effigies of the queen and the writer were burned in riots across Pakistan. That country's religious affairs minister initially said that conferring such an honor on Rushdie justified sending suicide bombers to Britain, then — under pressure — he modified his statement to say it would cause suicide bombers to travel there. Pakistan's national assembly unanimously condemned Rushdie's knighthood and said it reflected "contempt" for Islam and Muhammad. Various high-ranking Iranian clerics called for the writers' death and renewed their insistence that Khomeini's fatwa still is in force. Riots spread to India's Muslim communities.

....

What masquerades as tolerance and cultural sensitivity among many U.S. journalists is really a kind of soft bigotry, an unspoken assumption that Muslim societies will naturally repress great writers and murder honest journalists, and that to insist otherwise is somehow intolerant or insensitive.

Lost in the self-righteous haze that masks this expedient sentiment is a critical point once made by the late American philosopher Richard Rorty, who was fond of pointing out that "some ideas, like some people, are just no damn good" and that no amount of faux tolerance or misplaced fellow feeling excuses the rest of us from our obligation to oppose such ideas and such people.

If Western and, particularly American, commentators refuse to speak up when their obligations are so clear, the fanatics will win and the terrible silence they so fervently desire will descend over vast stretches of our world — a silence in which the only permissible sounds are the prayers of the killers and the cries of their victims.

I think Instapundit hits this:

...

Read the whole thing. Frankly, I think the best argument for electing a Democrat as President is that as long as a Republican is in office the media powers-that-be will refuse to condemn even the worst atrocities on the part of Islamists, for fear of helping the real enemy in the White House . . . . (Via Joe Schmo).
posted at 08:52 PM by Glenn Reynolds

 

[Diuretic]

I've seen/heard/read quite a bit of coverage of the outrage against Rushdie. I was listening to an Imam in Pakistan explain why Osama bin Laden has been given some sort of award as a sort of nyah-nyah to the Brits knighting Rushdie. I did read a piece that said it was a bad idea. But for the most part I think ignoring these fools is the best thing the West can do.

 

[Annie]

I've seen/heard/read quite a bit of coverage of the outrage against Rushdie. I was listening to an Imam in Pakistan explain why Osama bin Laden has been given some sort of award as a sort of nyah-nyah to the Brits knighting Rushdie. I did read a piece that said it was a bad idea. But for the most part I think ignoring these fools is the best thing the West can do.

I think that's pretty much what we did, right up to 9/11. Seriously.