No statute of limitations on the Rushdie Fatwa

Major terrorist attack  against the Charlie-Hebdo magazine in Paris -  The Khomeini fatwa against Salman Rushdie

It should be remembered that the first serious wave of Islamist terrorist attacks against those responsible for " blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammed" were the result of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini February 1989 fatwa calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie, in response to his depiction of the prophet in his book “The Satanic Verses.” Here is a non-comprehensive list.

The United Kingdom was the country where violence against bookstores occurred most often and persisted the longest. Two large bookstores in Charing Cross Road, London were bombed on 9 April. In May, explosions went off in the town of High Wycombe and again in London, on Kings Road. Other bombings included one at a large London department store (Liberty's), in connection with the Penguin Bookshop inside the store, and at the Penguin store in York. Unexploded devices were found at Penguin stores in Guildford, Nottingham, and Peterborough.

In the United States bombings of book stores included two in Berkeley, California. In New York, the office of a community newspaper, The Riverdale Press, was destroyed by firebombs, in retaliation for an editorial defending the right to read the novel, and criticizing the bookstores that pulled it from their shelves.

In October 1993 the novel's Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was shot and seriously injured.

In Turkey, thirty-seven intellectuals and locals participating in the Pir Sultan Abdal Literary Festival died when the conference hotel in Sivas was burnt down by a mob of radical islamists. Participating in the conference was Aziz Nesin, who had previously announced that he was going to get the book translated and published. The mob demanded he be handed over for summary execution. Nesin escaped the fire and survived.

On 14 February 2006, the Iranian state news agency reported that the fatwa will remain in place permanently. In 2012, Hassan Sanei, the head of the state-funded 15 Khordad, raised the bounty on Rushdie’s head by $500,000 to $3.3million ($2million).

In February 2014 Iranian mullah Hassan Sanei said: “Surely if the sentence of the Imam had been carried out, the later insults in the form of caricatures, articles and the making of movies would not have occurred” and he proclaimed that the death fatwa against Salman Rushdie “is as fresh as ever for Muslims.”

Salman Rushdie reported that he still receives a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on 14 February letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to kill him.

From: Karmon Ely
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2015 7:10 PM
To: Karmon Ely (ekarmon@idc.ac.il)
Subject: Major terrorist attack against the Charlie-Hebdo magazine in Paris

Please hear my first reaction about today's major terrorist attack  against the Charlie-Hebdo magazine in Paris on the Voice of Israel radio:

http://www.voiceofisrael.com/terror-expert-france-big-problem/

Ely Karmon, PhD

Senior Research Scholar

International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) and

The Institute for Policy and Strategy (IPS) at

The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC(

Herzlyia, Israel

Tel.:   972-9-9527277

Cell.: 972-52-2653306

Fax.: 972-9-9513073, 972-9-7716653

E-mail: ekarmon@idc.ac.il

Web: http://www.ict.org.il/