On the 16th anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie, the Iranian government has publicly stated that the death penalty remains in force:
"Muslims have never accepted insults against their sacred values," the guards said two days before the anniversary of the fatwa, or religious decree, which disrupted Iran's relations with the European Union through the 1990s."The day will come when they will punish the apostate Rushdie for his scandalous acts and insults against the Koran and the Prophet (Mohammed)," they said in reference to his book "The Satanic Verses" which prompted Khomenei's decree.
"The imam's historic fatwa, issued in the days when the infidel leaders who champion liberal democracy and Zionism devoted all their energies to fighting Islam, is testament to Muslim greatness and the revolutionary dynamism of Koranic and Islamic thought."
The guards' comments came a month after Khomenei's successor as Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said he still believed the British novelist deserved to die.
"They talk of respect for all religions but they support an apostate worthy of death like Rushdie," Khamenei complained in a message to Iranian pilgrims on January 19.
The article also points out that the 15th of Khordad Foundation, a Tehran-based trust, has placed a $2.8 million bounty on Rushdie's head and last year affirmed that the fatwa remained in force today. This is a mindset that cannot be negotiated with or reasoned with, it can only be defeated. Ultimately, they will lose, just as this same mindset was stamped out of Christianity over the last few hundred years by the mixture of Christianity with Enlightenment humanism, relegated only to the backwaters of the most backward thinking. The same thing will inevitably happen to this brand of radical Islam, and we can certainly hasten that day by reaching out to moderate Muslims and helping build them up in opposition to the reactionaries.
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