BRAVO SALMAN RUSHDIE


He’s at it again, tilting against the windmills that kept him underground with a death threat fatwa.     In a recent speech, Rushdie drew on his ‘language making ‘ skills to throw up the term ‘mangled’ language of ‘jihadi cool’.

He blamed ‘mangled language of religion’ for creating extremism amongst British Muslims, supposedly refugees from the terror in their own home countries.   Acknowledging that the mangling of language by religion was primarly Islamic—specifically the Salafist movement backed globally by Saudi Arabia, he also threw arrows at the Christian extremists in America and the Hindu extremists for their respective contributions.
However what , he says, made matters worse was the addition of ‘jihadi cool’, described as deformed hate-filled medievalist language of fanaticism, backed by modern weaponry, that  has made angry young men the most dangerous new weapon of today’s world.

I liked his conclusion best:
“If I don’t like your ideas, it must be acceptable for me to say so, just as it is acceptable for you to say that you don’t like mine. Ideas cannot be ringfenced just because they claim to have this or that Fictional Sky God on their side”

There speaks Rationality.

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