Salman Rushdie has been given a knighthood in the Queens Birthday Honours list.

The author of the Satanic Verses is now Sir Salman Rushdie, not to be confused with Salmon Rosti which would be grated potato and salmon made into a kind of burger shape which would be slightly more palatable to our muslim friends than Rushdie’s knighthood.

The Iranians have had a bit of a whinge – the Iranian Foreign Minister said that “Giving a medal to someone who is among the most detested figures in the Islamic community is… a blatant example of the anti-Islamism of senior British officials” according to the BBC.  It was the Iranians who issued a Fatwah (a religious death warrant) on Rushdie after he wrote the Satanic Verses.

The Pakistani’s are the latest ones to bitch about it.  The High Commissioner in Islamabad was summoned to the Foreign Ministry so they could tell him that they were upset and the North West Frontier Province government said that the knighthood is part of “a campaign waged in Europe and the West to hurt the feelings of Muslims”.  The Pakistani Religious Affairs Minister even went as far as saying that “if someone commits suicide bombing to protect the honour of the Prophet Mohammad, his act is justified”.

At the beginning of the month, when Traitor Bliar was announcing his million pound giveaway for Islamic Studies at UK universities, he said that British politicians must listen harder to the “calm voice of moderation” of the majority of the UK’s muslims.  Try as I might, I can’t find any denunciation from the “calm voice of moderation” of the incitement to commit a suicide bombing or a call for the worlds muslims to turn the other cheek.  I’m sure they must have said something but the Islamophobic zionist press must have covered it up.

This is the problem with Islam.  The religion hasn’t really evolved much from mediævil times and still revolves around strict orthodox adherence to fundamentalist values and “honour”.  Insulting their god is bad enough but insulting his prophet is worse – bad enough to drive someone to blow up a train full of innocent people, both muslims and infidels.  There is no leniency or clemency in Islam – you break the “law” and you pay the consequences, often through mutilation or death.

Now, I don’t want to tar all muslims with one brush because I know quite a few and they’re not all deranged terrorists.  It’s fair to say that most muslims don’t feel the need to purge the earth of infidels, perform genital mutilation on young girls or stone women to death for being raped.  But it happens.  Personally I think it’s wrong but that just the way I was brought up, who’s to say that the values and morals I have are right or better than someone elses?  As long as the practices that I, and most people in this country, believe are barbaric are only performed in countries where it is considered acceptable then leave them to it, they’ll soon run out of sinners.  Or stones.

Which brings me back to this whole Sir Salmon Rosti thing in a rather convoluted way.  The Satanic Verses isn’t offensive to us and muslims are a small, albeit very vocal and pandered-to, minority in England.  Rushdie has written more than one book and his writings are, I gather, fairly well respected in certain circles.  I personally wouldn’t have considered giving Rushdie a knighthood and I’m not happy with the decision to give him one because I don’t think he’s done anything of note for England or English people.  But the committee that decides on these things obviously thought he was worth the honour and the predictable – and frankly, quite tedious – outcry from the Islamic world.

In other words, it is acceptable here for someone who has written a book that offends muslims, to receive a knighthood and as we haven’t asked any muslim countries to confer a similar honour on him then I really don’t see what concern it is of anyone other than our own people and until Islam moves on and finds a way to accept criticism in the same way that every other major religion on the planet has, there will never be an end to religiously-motivated violence.