Reward for Rushdie beheading
Pakistani traders Thursday announced a reward of 10 million rupees (165,000 dollars) for anyone who beheads Salman Rushdie following Britain’s decision to award the novelist a knighthood.Meanwhile Islamic scholars bestowed a top honour on Osama bin Laden in response to the British accolade, as a senior ruling party member said he would not hesitate to kill the ‘Satanic Verses’ writer.
The reward announcement came during a protest by 200 traders at Aabpara market, one of the main bazaars in the capital Islamabad, an AFP photographer said.
‘We will give 10 million rupees to anyone who beheads Rushdie,’ the secretary general of the Islamabad traders association, Ajmal Baluch, told the cheering crowd.
It is impossible to imagine such a worldview as demonstrated here co-existing peacefully with the values and traditions ‘western’ society holds dear. Our beliefs are a direct threat to theirs, and their beliefs demand action against us.
I remain hopeful that this situation can be changed, and indeed hopeful that it can be done with a minimum of violence, but it seems obvious to me that we can neither ignore nor simply wish away this very real problem.
