Salman Rushdie must be wondering if Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (AKA Sam Bacile) will be getting the same treatment Rushdie did. Nakoula was one of the people involved in making the trailer for the video about Islam and Muhammad that has gotten so much attention lately, mainly for allegedly inflaming radical Muslims. I say "allegedly" because it's appearing more likely that the video was just a convenient excuse to kill and destroy.
Just the other day an article by Rushdie appeared at the Newyorker.com website about what it's like to be the target of an Ayatollah Khomeini fatwa. It's written with the third person point of view which makes one wonder if that fiction writer is writing fiction. But since he was the headline news at the time, the main outline of his story is fairly common knowledge. And the story he tells is quite compelling. Here's an excerpt:
1989
Two thousand protesters was a small crowd in Pakistan. Even the most modestly potent politico could put many more thousands on the streets just by clapping his hands. That only two thousand “fundamentalists” could be found to storm the U.S. Information Center in the heart of Islamabad on February 12th was, in a way, a good sign. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was on a state visit to China at the time, and it was speculated that destabilizing her administration had been the demonstrators’ real aim. Religious extremists had long suspected her of secularism, and they wanted to put her on the spot. Not for the last time, “The Satanic Verses” was being used as a football in a political game that had little or nothing to do with it. Bricks and stones were thrown at security forces, and there were screams of “American dogs!” and “Hang Salman Rushdie!”—the usual stuff. None of this fully explained the police’s response, which was to open fire, using rifles, semiautomatic weapons, and pump-action shotguns. The confrontation lasted for three hours, and, despite all that weaponry, demonstrators reached the roof of the building and the American flag was burned, as were effigies of “the United States” and him. On another day, he might have asked himself what factory supplied the thousands of American flags that were burned around the world each year. But, on this day, everything else that happened was dwarfed by a single fact: five people were shot dead. Blood will have blood, he thought.
Here was a mortally ill old man, lying in a darkened room. Here was his son, telling him about Muslims shot dead in India and Pakistan. It was that book that caused this, the son told the old man, the book that is against Islam. A few hours later, a document was brought to the offices of Iranian radio and presented as Khomeini’s edict. A fatwa, or edict, is usually a formal document, signed and witnessed and given under seal at the end of a legal proceeding, but this was just a piece of paper bearing a typewritten text. Nobody ever saw the formal document, if one existed. The piece of paper was handed to the station newsreader and he began to read.
See The Disappeared - How the fatwa changed a writer’s life.
Given all that Rushdie has had to endure because of that, one has to wonder why someone decided to out Nakoula. It doesn't take an Ayatollah level fatwa to get radical Islamists worked up. But Nakoula certainly has reason to want to stay hidden. Or if gets time for parole violation, the California prison system will get the opportunity to keep him safe.
Too bad the Islamist extremists have been so successful in getting Americans to toe the line.
Added: Hello, what's this? Some extremist organ called 15 of Khordad Foundation has increased the bounty on Salman Rushdie. If 15 of Khordad Foundation isn't yet on President Obama's drone target list, it should be.
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