Salman Rushdie

[ICTChris]

Salman Rushdie has been stabbed in New York at an event.  A man ran on stage and appeared to attack Rushdie, who was knocked to the ground.  Some reports say he has been stabbed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62524922

Rushdie was subject to a fatwa calling for his death by the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeni in 1989 following his controvestial novel The Satanic Verses and has lived under the threat of death since.  While several people associated with the book have been murdered Rushdie has not been physically harmed until today.

 

[ICTChris]

Reports saying he was stabbed but managed to walk off stage after treatment.  Attacker arrested at the scene.

[Miguel Sanchez]

[welshbairn]

 

[carpetmonster]

Missing 'have any other PnBers had death orders issued against them by religious hardliners?' at end of OP, IMHO. 

[sparky88]

Smoked Salman

[throbber]

I saw a vid of a guy being stabbed in the neck a few weeks back and he was dead within seconds. 

[Detournement]

4 minutes ago, throbber said:

I saw a vid of a guy being stabbed in the neck a few weeks back and he was dead within seconds. 

The one from Brisbane? That was scary, I regretted watching that.

As for the bold Salman i've read the Satanic Verses and have very little sympathy for him.

[Bully Wee Villa]

Yep. It didn't do Anne Boleyn any favours, either.

[throbber]

2 minutes ago, Detournement said:

The one from Brisbane? That was scary, I regretted watching that.

As for the bold Salman i've read the Satanic Verses and have very little sympathy for him.

Yeah - some utter deviant sent me it and I didn’t know what was coming up. The amount of blood pishing out was insane, it was a scuffle over absolutely nothing as well.

whar did he say in his book that was so bad? I wasn’t aware of what he’d done but knew he was a controversial figure.

[Bully Wee Villa]

Imagine being considered "an utter deviant" by Throbber. 

Edited August 12, 2022 by Bully Wee Villa

[Bully Wee Villa]

10 minutes ago, Detournement said:

As for the bold Salman i've read the Satanic Verses and have very little sympathy for him.

Your "edgy" act is tedious as f**k.

[Detournement]

1 minute ago, throbber said:

Yeah - some utter deviant sent me it and I didn’t know what was coming up. The amount of blood pishing out was insane, it was a scuffle over absolutely nothing as well.

whar did he say in his book that was so bad? I wasn’t aware of what he’d done but knew he was a controversial figure.

Just small things like depicting Mohammed lying about the Angel Gabriel dictating the Koran to him, making Mohammed a paedo with a harem of prostitute wives and referring to him as Mahound throughout which is derogatory name used by medieval Christian writers during the Crusades implying that Mohammed was actually an evil demon.

It's a terrible novel, the parts set in 1980s London are cringeworthy.

[Detournement]

1 minute ago, Bully Wee Villa said:

Your "edgy" act is tedious as f**k.

Just like Salman Rushdie.

But i'm wisely just anonymously noising up a bunch of middle age numpties on a football forum rather than the whole of the world's second largest religion. Hence why i'm about to go for a beer rather than a blood transfusion.

[Cosmic Joe]

22 minutes ago, throbber said:

I saw a vid of a guy being stabbed in the neck a few weeks back and he was dead within seconds. 

That used to happen all the time in Lochee back in the day. 

No wait. That was getting necked in the Stack. 

[Detournement]

 

Quote

Among them was Jimmy Carter. In a March 1989 Op-Ed article in The New York Times titled "Rushdie's Book Is an Insult," Carter argued that "The Satanic Verses" was guilty of "vilifying" Muhammad and "defaming" the Koran. "The author, a well-versed analyst of Moslem beliefs, must have anticipated a horrified reaction throughout the Islamic world," Carter wrote. While condemning the death sentence and affirming Rushdie's right to free speech, the former president argued that "we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah's irresponsibility."

 

 

 

Quote

 

Another critic was the novelist and essayist John Berger, who wrote in The Guardian in February 1989: "I suspect that Salman Rushdie, if he is not caught in a chain of events of which he has completely lost control, might, by now, be ready to consider asking his world publishers to stop producing more or new editions of 'The Satanic Verses.' Not because of the threat of his own life, but because of the threat to the lives of those who are innocent of either writing or reading the book. This achieved — Islamic leaders and statesmen across the world might well be ready to condemn the practice of the Ayatollah issuing terrorist death warrants. Otherwise a unique 20th-century holy war, with its terrifying righteousness on both sides, may be on the point of breaking out sporadically but repeatedly - in airports, shopping streets, suburbs, city centers, wherever the unprotected live."

Roald Dahl was even sterner. In a letter to The Times of London, Dahl called Rushdie "a dangerous opportunist," saying he "must have been totally aware of the deep and violent feelings his book would stir up among devout Muslims. In other words, he knew exactly what he was doing and cannot plead otherwise. This kind of sensationalism does indeed get an indifferent book on to the top of the best-seller list, — but to my mind it is a cheap way of doing it." The author of dark children's books and stories for adults (who himself once had police protection after getting death threats) also advocated self-censorship. It "puts a severe strain on the very power principle that the writer has an absolute right to say what he likes," he wrote. "In a civilized world we all have a moral obligation to apply a modicum of censorship to our own work in order to reinforce this principle of free speech."

While calling the death sentence outrageous, John le Carré agreed. "I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity," the spy novelist told The New York Times in May 1989. "I am mystified that he hasn't said: 'It's all a mess. My book has been wildly misunderstood, but as long as human lives are being wasted on account of it, I propose to withdraw it.' I have to say that would be my position." Le Carré elaborated in "Salman Rushdie: Sentenced to Death" (1990), a biography by W.J. Weatherby. At a time when the leading American bookstore chains refused to carry the novel out of concern for their employees' safety, "again and again, it has been within his power to save the faces of his publishers and, with dignity, withdraw his book until a calmer time has come," le Carré said. "It seems to me he has nothing more to prove except his own insensitivity." Le Carré also questioned defending the book on literary merit alone: "Are we to believe that those who write literature have a greater right to free speech than those who write pulp? Such elitism does not help Rushdie's cause, whatever that cause has now become."

 

From an NTY article 

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/books/review/15donadio.html

[welshbairn]

Justifying the death penalty for blasphemy is quite the enlightened take, maybe the Life of Brian writers should go into hiding.

[Michael W]

Maybe members of the world's second largest religion would be far less precious and uptight about their religion being mocked if they too were allowed to go for a beer. 

[coprolite]

2 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

Justifying the death penalty for blasphemy is quite the enlightened take, maybe the Life of Brian writers should go into hiding.

Careful now

[AsimButtHitsASix]