Word: khomeini
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...from the beginning, been a story much stranger than fiction; if a novel had been so riddled with ironies, it would have been condemned for implausibility. In Salman Rushdie and Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the world has two master plotters, celebrated controversialists both, with unusually lively imaginations, each of them now in his own embattled hideout while the War of the Words rages on. Yet even Jorge Luis Borges -- or Rushdie -- could scarcely have dreamed up a scene in which a Muhammadan cleric vows to kill Salman Rushdie for a book in which the Prophet condemns an apostate called Salman...
...what they wanted -- only to find that perhaps they should not have wanted it after all. In banning the book, various wise bodies have ignored the truth that every parent knows: a prohibition is often an invitation in disguise. And in making his Valentine's Day call for massacre, Khomeini seems to have gone beyond overkill to hubris: unlike, say, the Christians who opposed The Last Temptation of Christ, he appears unwilling to let God take care of ultimate justice himself...
...story thus far: British-Indian author Salman Rushdie, 41, is in hiding somewhere in England. He lives under a death threat imposed by the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who charges that Rushdie's new novel, The Satanic Verses, is blasphemous and an insult to Islam. For good measure, Iranians have offered a bounty of as much as $5.2 million to Rushdie's executioner. The world is stunned by the notion that the Iranian leader would issue a death threat against a British subject who has merely written a work of phantasmagoric fiction that, to be sure, occasionally deals with Islam...
...light of the recent events and Iran's past pattern of erratic behavior, the U.S. should reevaluate its policy of attempting to normalize relations with Iran. It is clear that as long as Khomeini remains the undisputed leader of Iran, "moderates" will wield little influence. The fact that the leader of an entire nation would repeatedly issue a threat against a single individual proves the instability of Khomeini and his lack of understanding of the sanctity of human life. In the present poisoned climate, normality seems impossible...
...blame for the booksellers' decision to take the book off their shelves must be shared by the U.S. government. In the face of such a slow official reaction to the Khomeini threats, booksellers clearly felt that they had no choice...