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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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 Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 7:29 pm Post subject: |
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| On the other hand wrote: |
| BJWD wrote: |
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| I don't see where the guy is saying that that is the reason he objects to the award, that it will make Muslims riot and kill. He's implying that it will damage relations with the Muslim world. Which is probably true. |
"Building relations" means keeping muslims from being violent. You know that. I know that. This Labour dude knows that. Even the muslims know that. |
Well, then you shouldn't just be objecting to the peer's comments, you should be objecting every time Blair or anyone else says something along the lines of "we want to build relations with the Muslim world." Because according to you, that's just code for "please don't kill us."
But it does lead me to wonder exactly how you would want politicians to address the Muslim world, given that "building relations" is pretty standard boilerplate for diplomatic rhetoric when dealing with any part of the world. |
1) Don't invade them.
2) Don't import them. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 7:32 pm Post subject: |
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| BJWD wrote: |
| On the other hand wrote: |
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| It is a strange knighthood, he's only famous because of the Fatwa |
Incidentally, Naipaul also wrote a book critical of Islam, called Among The Believers. I wonder if anyone here has read it. |
I will have by next week. Thanks for the pointer. |
Check out Bend in the River, as well. African-independence era. |
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ED209
Joined: 17 Oct 2006
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| Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 8:20 pm Post subject: |
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| I hope he's got a book coming out. This is going to make him a mint. |
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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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| Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 8:22 pm Post subject: |
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| ED209 wrote: |
| I hope he's got a book coming out. This is going to make him a mint. |
Or his estate. |
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cwemory
Joined: 14 Jan 2006
Location: Gunpo, Korea
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| Posted: Tue Jun 19, 2007 2:25 am Post subject: |
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If you are to believe this editorial, Rushdie only received his knighthood as a reward for his "support" of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan  .
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Sir Salman's long journey
Rushdie's knighthood is a reward for abandoning the anti-establishment stance he once espoused
Priyamvada Gopal
Monday June 18, 2007
The Guardian
From Indianness to Englishness, speculates the narrator of The Satanic Verses, is an immeasurable distance. For Sir Salman Rushdie, "humbled to receive this great honour" from the monarch of a nation he once compared to "a peculiar-tasting smoked fish full of spikes and bones", that journey has culminated in a knighthood. There'll be carping and predictably impassioned defences. It will be recalled that Benjamin Zephaniah turned down the OBE, refusing to join "the oppressor's club", while Granta literati will rush to extol the humane virtues of English literature and empire.
This is not, ultimately, about one man's oddly bathetic "gratitude" or even the meaning of being knighted in this day and age. Recognition from on high is probably thrilling to even the most jaded among us. More interesting is the question of why this "honour" comes now and what Rushdie's alacrity in accepting it tell us about politics and letters in our times, the very stuff of his greatest fiction.
To see the knighthood as "belated" endorsement by the British establishment is to miss the point entirely. Until, and even after, the vicious death sentence pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini, Rushdie could not possibly have been endorsed by an establishment he had committed himself to undermining in merciless prose and brilliant satire. Rushdie wrote powerful essays about institutional racism, cultural condescension, Thatcherism, anti-immigrant legislation, Raj nostalgia and a sham multiculturalism where a "black man could only become integrated when he started behaving like a white man".
With equal ferocity, he criticised those in postcolonial nations and ethnic minority communities who asserted themselves through chauvinism, fundamentalism, censorship and literalism. It was necessary to critique tyrannical forces in both west and non-west, to recognise them as twinned and to pronounce a plague on both their houses. From the magnificent Midnight's Children to the brilliantly flawed The Moor's Last Sigh, this uncompromising ethical vision underlies plain Mr Rushdie's best fiction.
Sir Salman, on the other hand, is partly the creation of the fatwa that played its role in strengthening the self-fulfilling "clash of civilisations" that both Bush and Osama bin Laden find so handy. Driven underground and into despair by zealotry, Rushdie finally emerged blinking into New York sunshine shortly before the towers came tumbling down. Those formidable literary powers would now be deployed not against, but in the service of, an American regime that had declared its own fundamentalist monopoly on the meanings of "freedom" and "liberation". The Sir Salman recognised for his services to literature is certainly no neocon but is iconic of a more pernicous trend: liberal literati who have assented to the notion that humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally western ideas that have to be defended as such.
Vociferously supporting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq on "humane" grounds, condemning criticism of the war on terror as "petulant anti-Americanism" and above all, aligning tyranny and violence solely with Islam, Rushdie has abdicated his own understanding of the novelist's task as "giving the lie to official facts". Now he recalls his own creation Baal, the talented poet who becomes a giggling hack coralled into attacking his ruler's enemies. Denuded of texture and complexity, it is no accident that this fiction since the early 90s has disappeared into a critical wasteland. The mutation of this relevant and stentorian writer into a pallid chorister is a tragic allegory of our benighted times, of the kind he once narrated so vividly. |
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2105446,00.html |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Tue Jun 19, 2007 6:52 am Post subject: |
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| The Sir Salman recognised for his services to literature is certainly no neocon |
Rushdie has summed up his own relation to neo-con ideology as follows...
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| Christopher's journey toward Wolfowitz is a lot further along than mine. |
So, presumably, he has actually started out on the journey.
http://tinyurl.com/32hks4 |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Tue Jun 19, 2007 7:26 am Post subject: |
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| cwemory wrote: |
| If you are to believe this editorial... |
Yet another cynic in the leftist Guardian speculating on the-world-according-to-him-or-her and why he or she (cannot tell which from the name) believes Rushdie won the honorary knighthood? No thanks. |
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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 5:49 pm Post subject: |
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Muslims hold new protests against Rushdie award
by Danny Kemp Wed Jun 20, 6:10 PM ET
ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Outrage mounted in the Muslim world Wednesday over Britain's knighthood for Salman Rushdie, with protests spreading to Malaysia and a top Pakistani cleric calling for the novelist to be killed.
The rallies came a day after both Pakistan and Iran -- whose late supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced the "Satanic Verses" author to death in 1989 -- summoned Britain's ambassadors to protest.
In Kuala Lumpur about 20 members of Malaysia's main Islamic opposition, the Pan-Malaysia Islamic party, shouted "Go to hell Britain! Go to hell Rushdie!" outside the British High Commission.
They handed a one-page memorandum to the British envoy during the rare half-hour demonstration, which was watched by a large police contingent with riot shields and helmets.
"In the name of peace and mutual respect, we demand that the award be withdrawn, and the British government distance itself from a provocateur like Salman Rushdie," party president Abdul Hadi Awang said. |
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070620/wl_asia_afp/britainrushdie
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Sir Osama bin Laden?
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. |
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=126&art_id=nw20070620112908423C340437
Just wait until tomorrow when all the seething muslims come out of after Friday prayers! I love it! |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 3:06 am Post subject: |
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| Just wait until tomorrow when all the seething muslims come out of after Friday prayers! I love it! |
Well, I figure that by now Friday has come and gone everywhere in the world. Anyone got a lead on the rioting? |
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