Self-refuting Quote of the Day

[muckefuck]

What is it about those Iranians and their attempts to express outrage?

"Salman Rushdie has turned into a hated corpse which cannot be resurrected by any action," First Deputy Speaker Mohammad Reza Bahonar told Iran's parliament.

"The action by the British Queen in knighting Salman Rushdie, the apostate, is an unwise one," he said to loud applause from MPs.

"The British monarch lives under this illusion that Britain is still a 19th Century superpower and that bestowing titles is something still deemed important." (Source)

Comments

so much for fundamentalism...

[monshu.livejournal.com]

Fundamentalists of any stripe--be they Islamic, Hindu, Christian, whatever--really do believe they see things through god's eyes. The hubris of that--typically not spoken highly of in their own sacred writings, not some slanted interpretation of their scriptures--speaks loudly to me of incredible frustration in a world they are not comfortable in or with. You can't change the socio-economic realities of today's societies easily, but you can burn, maim, and kill. Does that really change the social landscape? Not for long, not permanently. In my opinion god's eyes weep at all this.

Rant over. My opinions solely.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Wait, what's that list of stages involved in dealing with bad news? I see denial and rage - how many to go before we hit acceptance?

I'm sure it sounds much more natural in Persian, but turned into a hated corpse is just funny in English, perhaps because hatred is not something we normally associate with corpses (fear, revulsion maybe).

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

Even more worrying is that Pakistan's Minister for Religious Affairs said that Rushdie's knighthood justifies suicide bombers.

Even more worrying than that is that the government knighted a writer who was born in India and lives in the US, who wrote one great book and has been going downhill ever since...

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

No, I think the Pakistani minister is the most worrying... giving Rushdie a knighthood does clearly fall under the category of Muslim-baiting, but supporting suicide bombers from a position in government is truly alarming.

FWIW I don't think either his place of birth or of residence should be relevant. As far as 'services to literature' go, I'm not convinced he's written even one great book - The Moor's Last Sigh wasn't bad, but he was still trying too hard on the 'magical realism' front.

They seem to have run out of people to honour: Ian Botham? John Hegarty, of all people (an advertising exec, for those not in the know)? It seem like pretty much anybody rich or famous can expect to pick up an honour eventually. I'm looking forward to Julian Clary getting his OBE, he'll do something interesting with it.

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

Really - you don't rate Midnight's Children?

The problem with Moor's Last Sigh for me wasn't the magic realism, it was just the fact that he couldn't end it. The whole last third was like a different book, grafted on.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

true enough... although even on these grounds it's superior to Satanic Verses.

I have to confess, I haven't read Midnight's Children - I was too discouraged by the other things of his I'd suffered through. You say it's good?

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It's really very good. For me even the best of his other stuff has felt like a disappointment.

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

"has turned into a hated corpse"? Does that mean they think he's already dead, so they don't have to mess with killing him?

Poor man! He's the canary in our current coal mine of a world.

I came up with my own eschatology: God will rapture away all the Fundamentalists and the rest of us will have a 1000-year reign of peace. (Where God takes the Fundamentalists, isn't up to me.)