Iran can’t shirk the blame for the attack on Salman Rushdie

So according to Iran it is Salman Rushdie’s own fault that he got stabbed. It had nothing to do with the vile death warrant issued by Iran’s own ayatollah in 1989. It’s unrelated to the fact that the fatwa was reaffirmed in 2005. It’s not because Iran’s Revolutionary Guards once said ‘the day will come when (Muslims) will punish the apostate Rushdie for his scandalous acts and insults against the Koran’. No, it’s all Salman’s fault for – you guessed it – ‘insulting the sacred matters of Islam’. He brought that terrible knife attack upon himself.

It is hard to think of a more despicable response to the alleged attempted murder of Rushdie than this. For more than three decades Iran has dangled a death sentence over Rushdie’s head. A death sentence which expressly says that ‘all brave Muslims of the world’ have a duty to kill Rushdie and his publishers ‘without delay’.