Rushdie furore stuns honours committee· Muslim backlash after knighthood not foreseen
· UK protests over Pakistani minister’s remarksDuncan Campbell and Julian Borger
Wednesday June 20, 2007
The GuardianReligious students in Multan, Pakistan, burn effigies of the Queen and Salman Rushdie during protests against the awarding of the knighthood. Photograph: Khalid Tanveer/AP
The committee that recommended Salman Rushdie for a knighthood did not discuss any possible political ramifications and never imagined that the award would provoke the furious response that it has done in parts of the Muslim world, the Guardian has learnt.
It also emerged yesterday that the writers’ organisation that led the lobbying for the author of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses to be knighted had originally hoped that the honour would lead to better relations between Britain and Asia.
I can’t help but smile. Just what were they thinking? That we handled Danoongate and the Pope’s Remarks so well that, well, things are “getting better all the time…”? Clearly they didn’t read Dan Pipes, The Rushdie Affair.
The news came as the row spread around the world and the British high commissioner in Islamabad made representations to the Pakistani government over remarks supposedly made by the minister for religious affairs, Mohammed Ejaz ul-Haq, in which he appeared to justify suicide bombings as a response to the award.
Rushdie was celebrating his 60th birthday in London yesterday and is not commenting on the latest threats to his life. It is understood he is anxious not to inflame the situation. Scotland Yard declined to comment as a matter of policy on whether the writer has been given police protection.
The arts and media committee that proposed him for a knighthood is one of eight similar committees that make recommendations to the main committee, which then forwards the final names to the prime minister.
It was chaired by Lord Rothschild, the investment banker and former chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery. The other committee members are Jenny Abramsky, the BBC’s director of radio and music; novelist and poet Ben Okri, who is vice-president of the English chapter of PEN International, which campaigns on behalf of writers who face persecution; Andreas Whittam Smith, former editor of the Independent; John Gross, the author and former theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph; and two permanent secretaries, one from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and one from the Scottish executive.
Watch out for the Elders of Zion.
“Very properly, we were concerned only with merit in relation to the level of the award,” Mr Whittam Smith said yesterday.
He added that it would be for the main committee to assess any other aspects of the honour. The Foreign Office is represented on the main committee by the permanent secretary, whose job it would be to raise any potential international ramifications. A Foreign Office spokesman said he was not aware of any request by the honours committee to gauge likely Muslim reaction to the knighthood before the decision was taken.
PEN International, which campaigned on behalf of Rushdie when he was in hiding during the fatwa years, has lobbied consistently for him to be honoured. Yesterday the director of its London chapter, Jonathan Heawood, said that he was taken aback by the scale of the reaction.
Mr Heawood said it had been felt that an honour for the writer, who was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), would be seen as a positive step in British-Asian relations.
“The honour is for services to literature and a very belated recognition that he is a world writer, who was in the vanguard of a writing tradition that exploded in the 80s in south Asia,” said Mr Heawood.
“It seems a shame that a few lines in his fourth novel should have turned him into this hate figure. He has become a Guy Fawkes figure to be thrown on a bonfire whenever it suits a government to divert attention from what is happening in their own countries.”
Welcome to the global Middle East.
The Pakistani foreign ministry summoned the British high commissioner yesterday to complain about the knighthood, but British officials said they used the occasion to protest about the remarks by Mr Ejaz ul-Haq, who has since said that his comments were a statement of fact and not intended to incite violence.
“The high commissioner, Robert Brinkley, made clear to the Pakistan ministry of foreign affairs the British government’s deep concern about what the minister of religious affairs is reported to have said,” a Foreign Office spokeswoman said. “We made very clear that nothing can justify suicide bomb attacks.”
However, Pakistan’s foreign minister, Kurshid Kasuri, said on a visit to Washington that Britain could not have been surprised by the outrage.
The chairman of the all-party group on Pakistan, the Conservative MP Stewart Jackson, also attacked the decision to knight Rushdie. “We do not need a situation where we are gratuitously offending our allies in the fight against terror,” he told the ePolitix website. “I think the prime minister’s office should think very carefully about that decision.”
No date has been set for the investiture. Two ceremonies are due to take place next month but they are likely to be for those who were named in the New Year’s honours list. Rushdie could become Sir Salman in the next batch of investitures between October and December or early next year.
Watch this empty space in British brains.
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Comment by David M — June 20, 2007 @ 10:03 am
“”Very properly, we were concerned only with merit in relation to the level of the award,” Mr Whittam Smith said yesterday.”
He is right. We cannot live out lives constantly trying to avoid causing offense to one hypersensitive person or another.
Certain people are actively looking for things to be offended about, so that they can bully and threaten. They should be ignored, except by the security services.
Comment by Don Cox — June 20, 2007 @ 11:42 am
You can’t make this stuff up:
Islamabad - A hard-line Pakistani parliamentarian and head of a religious political party on Wednesday demanded a “sir” title for Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, in retaliation for Britain knighting author Salman Rushdie.
“Muslims should confer the ’sir’ title and all other awards on bin Laden and Mullah Omar in reply to Britain’s shameful decision to knight Rushdie,” Sami ul Haq, leader of the pro-Taliban Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, said in a statement, referring also to the leader of the Taliban.
Such a move would not only go against the political grain of Britain, who joined in the international effort to drive the Taliban from power and al-Qaeda from their Afghan safe haven in 2001, but it would also break knighthood rules, under which foreigners may not be addressed as sir.
snip
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=3&art_id=nw20070620112908423C340437
Comment by Sophia — June 20, 2007 @ 4:09 pm
don,
we can’t but this is exactly what we’re going to do.
watch now for the stream of apologies, and “explanations”, and “outreach” and other groveling, and for some “compensatory” acts like funding islamist education or some such.
and if violence occurs, they’ll beg for forgiveness on their knees.
Comment by fp — June 20, 2007 @ 8:59 pm
Britain seems to dance at all the weddings [tantst ba alleh khassenehs]. Whereas the UK gave a knighthood to Rushdie for his life work, such as it is [and he is not the most highly regarded novelist, however we may feel about his political predicament and the Islamic threat against him], the British state employes union [UNISON] called for a boycott against Israel in all fields.
This demonstrates that a Nazi-like body of public opinion is very pervasive and large in Britain. It is no surprise since the UK has had a Judeophobic policy since about 1920, at first directed against Zionism, against the Jewish National Home project, later operating as a silent partner of Nazi Germany in the Holocaust, after the Holocaust sending Jewish refugees, Holocaust survivors [from the boat Exodus] to Germany. The BBC at first overlooked the Holocaust and then minimized coverage of it. See link:
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2006/05/british-governmental-guidance-of.html
[also see my posts concerning Shmul Zigelboym and Anthony Eden].
Today of course, the BBC, still an arm of the Foreign Office, disseminates pro-Arab terrorist propaganda, smearing, besmirching, defaming, demonizing Israel, which always has been a practice of Judeophobes throughout European history. This smearing is a necessary prelude to massacres of Jews. The BBC’s smears can be likened to the medieval blood libels.
Evelyn Gordon asks in a recent op ed in the JPost “Why Britain?” The question is in place. Her analysis is OK but it hardly goes far enough, showing that her historical knowledge of the subject is not wide or deep enough. For example, she misses the British silent partnership in the Holocaust. But her conclusion is right. She writes that Israel must divest itself of any expectations of decent treatment from the UK, and hence must not rely on the UK for political-diplomatic cooperation in the future. We should urge Israeli and friendly institutions, trade unions, etc. here and abroad to reduce relations with the British. Despite the British reputation for civilization, the UK Govt and important parts of UK public opinion are committed to a pro-Hamas [pro-Nazi] policy, to a policy harmful to civilization. There is no quick or easy to persuade fanatics like that that we are OK. Certainly, giving up territory that rightly belongs to Israel will only make things worse as we have seen over the past fifteen years.
The hate for Israel expressed by the UNISON is also the UK govt’s policy, which is covered by the usual British hypocrisy. Indeed, the UNISON serves as a support and cover for the Govt’s policy. Further, Evelyn Gordon was mistaken in considering Tony Blair a friend of Israel, since he was pursuing a PRO-HAMAS POLICY since 2002 [whereas the UK’s pro-Arab policy goes back to 1920, albeit with zigzags, if not earlier]. See links:
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2007/05/is-united-kingdom-israels-most.html
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2007/05/g8-helps-palestinian-authority-instead.html
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2007/05/muslim-leader-reminds-us-that-london.html
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2007/06/semi-official-brits-do-it-again-british.html
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2007/06/uk-arab-relations-everythings-cozy-when.html
Of course, there are many honorable and civilized people in Britain who don’t like the policy direction of bodies like the UNISON and the university lecturers union and the journalists union, etc. Those honorable people deserve our respect.
Comment by Eliyahu — June 21, 2007 @ 8:15 am
just remember who said “we have peace in our time” vis-a-vis hitler. that’s no coincidence.
i hope blair further screws his country by signing off on the eu constitution-light — this is what they deserve.
Comment by fp/http://fallofknowledgeandreason.blogspot.com/ — June 21, 2007 @ 3:30 pm