Salman Rushdie Threatening Lawsuit Over Policeman's Book

[De Selby]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7538875.stm

Rushdie anger at policeman's book 
 
Sir Salman Rushdie is planning legal action against his former police driver

Sir Salman Rushdie is threatening to sue a former police bodyguard who has written a book about protecting the author while he was in hiding.

The award-winning writer is furious at the way he has been portrayed by Ron Evans in On Her Majesty's Service.

Mr Evans was among the officers who guarded Sir Salman after The Satanic Verses led to death threats in 1989.

The author told BBC News the claims were "a bunch of lies" and he was seriously considering legal action.

Sir Salman said the book was defamatory and is demanding that the offending chapters be removed.

Saw this headline the other day.  I've always seen Salman Rushdie as a self-important grandstander who profited from playing up the bogus threat to his life from Iran.  I think his literary reputation has been put beyond question by the affair, when it otherwise would be very much in question or at least not nearly as lionized as it has been.

Of course, I'm sure suing to silence a critical book won't stop him from droning on at the next free speech event he attends.  Hypocrisy is no reason to forfeit a speaker's fee or a book sale.

[Manedwolf]

Yeah, because being under a global death threat for twenty years from the screaming beards is "grandstanding". 

[De Selby]

Yeah, because being under a global death threat for twenty years from the screaming beards is "grandstanding". 

It is grandstanding when there's been no attempt on your life, you make media appearances monthly and collect a princely fee as a result of the controversy.

He's not under a "global threat" and never has been.  He wanders around England (supposedly home to a terrorist army) and India (which has actual terrorist armies) going on television on a regular basis and not only has he not been harmed, there hasn't even been an attempt. 

The threat has been hyped for his benefit; it's a great testament to his personal hypocrisy that he made his fame and fortune touting free speech against any restriction, and now he's suing someone to silence criticism.

[agricola]

Yeah, because being under a global death threat for twenty years from the screaming beards is "grandstanding". 

It is grandstanding when there's been no attempt on your life, you make media appearances monthly and collect a princely fee as a result of the controversy.

He's not under a "global threat" and never has been.  He wanders around England (supposedly home to a terrorist army) and India (which has actual terrorist armies) going on television on a regular basis and not only has he not been harmed, there hasn't even been an attempt. 

The threat has been hyped for his benefit; it's a great testament to his personal hypocrisy that he made his fame and fortune touting free speech against any restriction, and now he's suing someone to silence criticism.

SS, the bits at the end add a bit of context:

In 2005, Mr Evans was convicted on nine counts of false accounting and ordered to pay £6,280.85 in fines and costs.

A statement from the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) about the book said Mr Evans had not been asked to sign a confidentiality agreement.

"It is not our intention to comment on Ron Evans' recollection and interpretation of specific events. We regret that he chooses to publish this book," the MPS said.

"There were a number of passages within the draft which caused [us] concern. Following legal advice we negotiated with the publishers to make some alterations."

[De Selby]

agricola,

Yeah, I saw that bit.  We don't have the same sorts of defamation laws here in the United States, and Salman Rushdie has made a nice paycheck for himself by touting our style of freedom of speech-no silence of criticism, and how fabulous it is to publish books that "aren't safe."

If he's so hard up on free speech and literary freedom, he should be willing to accept that people will write bad things about him.  Certainly he should be more principled than to sue so that the critical points of view don't even make it to press.

[K Frame]

That's funny...

Theo Van Gogh wasn't in any danger, either, I suppose, from the screaming beard Jihadi Islamics.

Until he was murdered by a screaming beard Jihadi Islamic.

And Van Gogh didn't even have a screaming beard Jihadi Islamic leader of a nation of screaming beard Jihadi Islamics declare a fatwah on him.

Oh, wait, silly us.

Mohammed Bouyeri wasn't a screaming beard Jihadi Islamic.

He was a plant, a Jew from Brooklyn on a secret mission to make Islam look bad.

Sigh.

[De Selby]

No need to take a hard look at the differences between the circumstances of Theodore Van Gogh's death and the threat to Salman Rushdie-that would require understanding that "screaming beards" does not describe a unitary, or even similar, collection of people.

Oh wait-we'd have to do that to get the answer here.

Theo van gogh was killed by an active participant in Dutch Islamic politics.  He published political propaganda concerning...dutch islamic politics.

Salman Rushdie's threat came from someone who, from the outset, was certainly not recognized as an authority by between 90 and 80 percent of Muslims in the world, and of the potential 10 to 20, probably not a majority of those.  Of course the Islamic communities in his home country and in the UK have very little, if anything, to do with the ayatollahs in Iran.

Salman Rushdie was not involved in a highly charged anti-immigrant political movement in his own country, but was a novelist. 

Salman Rushdie's chances of being killed over the book are no better than his odds of being targeted by the same sorts of nuts who targeted John Lennon and Ronald Reagan.  His "death warrant" order was issued by someone who never commanded much authority in the Islamic world, and it has been consistently ignored.

Except, of course, by Rushdie, who has used the hype to profit handsomely.

[Dannyboy]

Except, of course, by Rushdie, who has used the hype to profit handsomely.

And score a smokin hot wife.  Even though she finally divorced him.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

Salman Rushdie's threat came from someone who, from the outset, was certainly not recognized as an authority by between 90 and 80 percent of Muslims in the world, and of the potential 10 to 20, probably not a majority of those.  Of course the Islamic communities in his home country and in the UK have very little, if anything, to do with the ayatollahs in Iran.

Which percentage did Mustaffa Mazeh belong to before he accidentally blew himself up while trying to kill Rushdie?

Wasn't there a multimillion dollar bounty on his head?  The number $4 million seems to stick out in my mind, but I might misremember.

I'm no particular fan of Rushdie.  I couldn't care either way if the screaming beards finally managed to pull it off.  But there really is/was a threat on his life.  No amount of screaming beard apologetics can whitewash that inconvenient fact away.

[De Selby]

Salman Rushdie's threat came from someone who, from the outset, was certainly not recognized as an authority by between 90 and 80 percent of Muslims in the world, and of the potential 10 to 20, probably not a majority of those.  Of course the Islamic communities in his home country and in the UK have very little, if anything, to do with the ayatollahs in Iran.

Which percentage did Mustaffa Mazeh belong to before he accidentally blew himself up while trying to kill Rushdie?

Wasn't there a multimillion dollar bounty on his head?  The number $4 million seems to stick out in my mind, but I might misremember.

I'm no particular fan of Rushdie.  I couldn't care either way if the screaming beards finally managed to pull it off.  But there really is/was a threat on his life.  No amount of screaming beard apologetics can whitewash that inconvenient fact away.

Any bounty was meaningless outside of Iran-how would you collect it?

Actually, I could care a lot if someone managed to kill him for his views.  That would be a disgrace and a crime of the worst sort.

There was never, though, a realistic possibility that he was going to be killed.  The only people who were in a position to take orders from the "fatwa" maker were in Iran, and Rushdie as far as I know has never even visited Iran.  It's the equivalent of Chairman Kim putting a bounty on the head of George Bush...yeah, it might carry some weight in Pyongyang, but I doubt that GW would have to worry cruising the highways of Texas. 

[agricola]

Salman Rushdie's threat came from someone who, from the outset, was certainly not recognized as an authority by between 90 and 80 percent of Muslims in the world, and of the potential 10 to 20, probably not a majority of those.  Of course the Islamic communities in his home country and in the UK have very little, if anything, to do with the ayatollahs in Iran.

Which percentage did Mustaffa Mazeh belong to before he accidentally blew himself up while trying to kill Rushdie?

Wasn't there a multimillion dollar bounty on his head?  The number $4 million seems to stick out in my mind, but I might misremember.

I'm no particular fan of Rushdie.  I couldn't care either way if the screaming beards finally managed to pull it off.  But there really is/was a threat on his life.  No amount of screaming beard apologetics can whitewash that inconvenient fact away.

It was $5.4 million, and there were quite a few bombings in the UK and US (of bookshops as well as the Mazeh self-removal) as well as at least one murder and several attempted murders elsewhere linked to the book.  Wikipedia has a good article on the whole controversy here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Verses_controversy

[roo_ster]

Well, well, here are some things I had forgotten until agricola & HTG met SS's assertions with fact:

In the United States, the FBI was notified of 78 threats to bookstores in early March 1989, thought to be a small proportion of the total number. B. Dalton bookstore chain received 30 threats in less than three hours. Bombings of book stores included two in Berkeley California. But the United Kingdom was the country where violence against bookstores occurred most often and persisted the longest. Two large Charing Cross Road London bookstores (Collets and Dillons) were bombed on April 9. In May, explosions went off in the town of High Wycombe and again in London, on King's Road. Other bombings include one at a large London department store (Liberty's), in connection with the Penguin Bookshop inside the store, and at the Penguin store in York. Unexploded devices were found at Penguin stores in Guildford, Nottingham, and Peterborough.

The bombings meant that hardly a single bookstore sold Rushdie's novel openly in the UK. In the United States, it was unavailable in about one-third of the bookstores. In many others which carried the book, it was kept under the counter. [25]

...

Several days after the fatwa was declared Iranian officials offered a bounty for the killing of Rushdie, who was thus forced to live under police protection for the next nine years. On 7 March 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke diplomatic relations over the Rushdie controversy.

In the mean time there were several attacks on those involved in the publishing of the book and "were aware" of its "contents." Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the book The Satanic Verses, was stabbed to death on July 11, 1991. Two other translators of the book survived attempted assassinations. [57] A spokesperson for the Pakistan Association in Japan told the press that "the murder was completely 100 percent connected with the book...Today we have been congratulating each other. Everyone was really happy."[56]

Ettore Capriolo, the Italian language translator, was seriously injured in a stabbing the same month as his Japanese counterpart. William Nygaard, the publisher in Norway, barely survived an attempted assassination in Oslo in October of 1993. One planned attack on Rushdie failed when the would-be bomber, Mustafa Mahmoud, blew himself up along with two floors of a central London hotel.

Hmm, the guys who were murdered/injured did not have the benefit of the UK's Finest to keep them safe, in a personal sort of way...

Gotta love it when the 'net can take a line of BS and flush it down the toilet where it belongs.


OTOH, if someone were to get nailed by a splodeydope, Rushdie is just the obnoxious, unappreciative sort of SOB that one would not lose sleep over.