Salman Rushdie condemns 'hate-filled rhetoric' of Islamic fanaticism

Accusations of 'Islamophobia' are being levelled at anyone who dares to speak out against the "hate-filled rhetoric" of Islamic fanaticism, Salman Rushdie has claimed in a speech condemning Isil and "this new age of religious mayhem".
Rushdie voiced his fears that the language of "jihadi-cool" is seducing young British Muslims, many via Twitter and YouTube, into joining the "decapitating barbarianism" of Isil, the group also referred to as Islamic State or Isis.
In his PEN/Pinter Prize Lecture, the author said all religions have their extremists but "the overwhelming weight of the problem lies in the world of Islam".
Last week, Isil beheaded taxi driver and charity worker Alan Henning, the latest Western hostage to die at their hands.
The so-called "jihadi-cool" image romanticises Isil, using rap videos and social networking to recruit followers - posing with AK-47s and bragging about their "five star jihad" in videos showing fighters lounging around in luxury villas as they urged the destruction of the West.

Rushdie defined "jihadi-cool" as "the deformed medievalist language of fanaticism, backed up by modern weaponry", saying: "It's hard not to conclude that this hate-filled religious rhetoric, pouring from the mouths of ruthless fanatics into the ears of angry young men, has become the most dangerous new weapon in the world today".
He said: "A word I dislike greatly, 'Islamophobia', has been coined to discredit those who point at these excesses, by labelling them as bigots. But in the first place, if I don't like your ideas, it must be acceptable for me to say so, just as it is acceptable for you to say that you don't like mine. Ideas cannot be ring-fenced just because they claim to have this or that fictional sky god on their side.
"And in the second place, it's important to remember that most of those who suffer under the yoke of the new Islamic fanaticism are other Muslims...
"It is right to feel phobia towards such matters. As several commentators have said, what is being killed in Iraq is not just human beings, but a whole culture. To feel aversion towards such a force is not bigotry. It is the only possible response to the horror of events.
"I can't, as a citizen, avoid speaking of the horror of the world in this new age of religious mayhem, and of the language that conjures it up and justifies it, so that young men, including young Britons, led towards acts of extreme bestiality, believe themselves to be fighting a just war."
The author said members of other religions have distorted language, but to a much lesser degree.
"It's fair to say that more than one religion deserves scrutiny. Christian extremists in the United States today attack women's
liberties and gay rights in language they claim comes from God. Hindu extremists in India today are launching an assault on free expression and trying, literally, to rewrite history, proposing the alteration of school textbooks to serve their narrow saffron dogmatism.
"But the overwhelming weight of the problem lies in the world of Islam, and much of it has its roots in the ideological language of blood and war emanating from the Salafist movement within Islam, globally backed by Saudi Arabia."
For these ideologues, "modernity itself is the enemy, modernity with its language of liberty, for women as well as men, with its insistence of legitimacy in government rather than tyranny, and with its stroninclination towards secularism and away from religion."
We live in a time when we are "too frightened of religion in general, and one religion in particular - religion redefined as the capacity of religionists to commit earthly violence in the name of their unearthly sky god... in which the narrow pseudo-explications of religion, couched in the new - or actually very old - vocabulary of blasphemy and offence, have increasingly begun to set the agenda".
Rushdie's publication of The Satanic Verses in 1989 led to him being placed under a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, who deemed it to be blasphemous. The author spent years in hiding under police protection.
In his speech, delivered at the British Library, he said of the reaction to his novel: "People are entitled to judge a book as kindly or as harshly as they choose, but when they respond to it with violence or the threat of violence, the subject changes, and the question becomes: how do we face down such threats? We have all been wrestling with the answer to that question on many fronts ever since."
Rushdie was speaking as he accepted the PEN Pinter Prize, established by the writers' charity English PEN in 2009 in memory of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter.
The prize is awarded annual to a British or British-based writer who "exemplifies the spirit of Harold Pinter through his or her engagement with the times".
Each year the winner shares the prize with an international writer who has risked their own safety in the name of free speech. Rushdie chose Mazen Darwish, a Syrian journalist and lawyer who is currently in prison.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11152718/Salman-Rushdie-condemns-hate-filled-rhetoric-of-Islamic-fanaticism.html

Very good, I've always admired Rushdie's courage. I've read a lot of works that talk about how people in dire situations are easily manipulated into extremist movements (and cults, by the way).

However, I would not recommend doing any web searches for "acts of extreme bestiality"

good on him for continuing to speak out but personally I cant stand his books....bit boring but hey such is life.

I tried to read "Satanic Verses" but it was during a bad period where I'd been tasked with reading a novel per week in university and really couldn't manage to read anything else, outside of newspaper and magazine articles.

Still waiting for his follow-up novel, "Buddha, You Fat Bastard."

(It was a Saturday Night Live joke, can't find the clip)

Ben_Reilly wrote:I tried to read "Satanic Verses" but it was during a bad period where I'd been tasked with reading a novel per week in university and really couldn't manage to read anything else, outside of newspaper and magazine articles.

Still waiting for his follow-up novel, "Buddha, You Fat Bastard."

(It was a Saturday Night Live joke, can't find the clip)

I remember........lol