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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