Islam Responds To Rushdie Knighthood -- Guess How

Say what you will about Muslims, their behavior is as predictable as stink on sweat socks.

In a replay of the Kartoonistan, the Mohammad cartoon caper, Muslims are rioting and flag-burning over the Queen's knighting of Salman Rushdie last weekend.

AFP reports on the sober Muslim response in Pakistan:

Muslim radicals burned an effigy of Queen Elizabeth Tuesday as Pakistan summoned the British ambassador over Salman Rushdie's knighthood and Iranian hardliners turned their fury on the monarch.

Anger has mounted in the neighbouring Islamic republics since the British monarch gave the 59-year-old author of "The Satanic Verses" the title of Sir Salman for services to literature at the weekend.

The row has thrown Rushdie back in the eye of the storm, 18 years after he was sentenced to death by Iran's revolutionary founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for blasphemy in a fatwa that has never been revoked.

Pakistan called British High Commissioner, or ambassador, Robert Brinkley to the foreign ministry in Islamabad on Tuesday to receive an official protest against the honour for the Indian-born writer, officials said.

Brinkley had defended the award, hailing Rushdie's "distinguished" career and saying in a statement that it was "simply untrue that this knighthood is intended as an insult to Islam or the Prophet Mohammed."

Religious Affairs Minister Ijaz-ul-Haq on Monday said the award for Rushdie justified suicide attacks, prompting outrage in Britain, although he later withdrew the remark. ..

Around 150 hardline protesters in the eastern city of Lahore torched an effigy of the British queen and called for Rushdie to be handed to a Muslim country and dealt with by a Sharia court, witnesses said.

"The punishment for a blasphemer is death," Shahid Gilani, who heads the youth wing of Pakistan's radical Jamaat-e-Islami party, told the crowd.

And in Iran:

In neighbouring Iran a non-governmental organisation, the Committee of Glorification of the Martyrs of the Islamic Movement, said it was increasing its reward for killing Rushdie to 150,000 dollars from 100,000 dollars.

Iranian conservatives attacked Queen Elizabeth over the "unwise" honour, with a top legislator saying she lived in a dreamworld in which Britain was still a 19th century superpower.

"Salman Rushdie has turned into a hated corpse which cannot be resurrected by any action," Mohammad Reza Bahonar, first deputy speaker of Iran's parliament, said in an address to the house.

Hardline daily Jomhuri Eslami also launched a scathing attack on the queen, describing the monarch as an "old crone" whose action was a "grimace to the Islamic world".

"The question is what the old British crone sought by knighting Rushdie, to help him? Well, her act only shortens Rushdie's pathetic life," it added.

Did Rushdie destroy a mosque? Did he round up Muslim enemies by the hundreds of thousands and execute them? Did he kill Muslim innocents by setting off a car bomb in a market? Did he suppress tens of millions of Muslims via a network of despotic theocracies that deprived the people of education and hope?

No, he wrote a book that some of the minority of Muslims who are actually literate thought portrayed Mohammad in a bad light.

Where is Islam's outrage at those who are actually killing and crippling the Muslim people?

Simple. It's buried under false outrage at silly targets, while those who continue the repression and exploitation of citizens throughout the Islamic world continue to dodge the rage they so fully deserve.