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Slander, Blasphemy & Censorship

Iran Ups Bounty for Murder of Salman Rushdie

Six hundred grand offer brings the total payday for killing the author to nearly four million dollars.

BY CounterJihad · @CounterjihadUS | February 24, 2016

In a sign of continued commitment to the murder of author Salman Rushdie for what former Ayatollah Khomeini called “blasphemy,” Iranian media outlets put together more than half a million dollars to add to the bounty on the novelist’s life.  A collection of news outlets linked to hard-line elements of the regime offered six hundred thousand dollars to anyone who successfully kills Rushdie in the name of Islam.  The bounty adds to existing figures offered by the regime in Iran, bringing the total to nearly four million American dollars.

The elected Iranian government claims that it no longer supports efforts to kill the author, whose novel, The Satanic Verses, brought down the fatwa against his life.  However, the current Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, is the only figure with the authority to rescind the death order and he has not done so.  The elected government in Iran is not truly sovereign, but is subject to the authority of the religious government under Iran’s constitution.  Iran is the only nation on earth with an elected President where the military forces are not under the control of the President.  Rather, Iran’s military ultimately reports to the clerical government and not to the elected government.  Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, which includes its elite special operations forces, reports to the clerics directly.

Several assassins have made attempts on Rushdie’s life over the decades since The Satanic Verses was published.  Iran’s tomb of assassins has a monument honoring what it describes as the “first” martyr to die in an attempt on his life, a young Lebanese man who accidentally detonated himself and several floors of a hotel while preparing a bomb to kill Rushdie.

Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah, laments the failure of Islamic assassins to kill Rushdie over the years. “If there had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini’s fatwa against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our Prophet Mohammed in Denmark, Norway and France would not have dared to do so,” the Hezbollah chief said in reference to the infamous “Mohammed cartoons” of 2006.  The attempt to enforce international censorship on the criticism of Islam turns, in other words, on the successful murder of those who engage in critical speech.

Just as the Mohammed cartoons were just sketches, Rushdie’s novel was just fiction.  The alleged violation for which he has been under a death mark was telling an explicitly fictional story built on some folk tales about verses Mohammed spoke but later rejected as having been inspired by the devil.  As today’s news shows, the defense that the book was obviously fiction has never been convincing to Rushdie’s enemies.  They have also rejected his apologies for having written the book.  Only his death will satisfy them.

Backgrounders

UN Resolution 16/18

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Obama administration have joined in endorsing a heckler’s veto on freedom of speech in violation of America’s most deeply-held political principles.

Slander in Islamic Law — What You’re Not Allowed to Say or Know

In sharia, the word translated as “slander” is the Arabic word ghiba. It means to say anything about someone that they do not like, even though it is true.

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