Rushdie, Fatwa, Ayatollah 2

[This isn’t gloating over the demise of anyone but is more of a social satire kind of thing - maybe if I had emotional ties to Iran, there might be more of that personal edge but anyway . . .]

“You know what makes me most sad and disappointed about this whole Iran and Ayatollah affair?”

“I don’t know - the suffering of innocents?”

“No, no, no! What’s most disappointing is this is another Ayatollah who didn’t live to see the fatwa on Salman Rushdie successfully carried out. Remember there was a bounty of 6 million dollars offered by the Iranian Republic back in 1989 for anyone succeeding in murdering Rushdie for that book he wrote, and I think it’s fair to say that was a generous amount of money to offer. And the most recent Ayatollah said the fatwa was ongoing and unquestionable, so I’m guessing that bounty was still up for grabs. Though come to think of it, you’d probably hope, considering inflation, the reward has risen in the meantime up to, let’s say, fifty million dollars.”

“Oh of course yeah. Everything has gone way up in price since then. That six million would have been a lot of money back then, but not particularly now. And you also have to consider there might be legal repercussions in some countries if you got caught murdering someone, so the generosity of the reward should reflect the element of danger involved in doing something like carrying out a fatwa.”

“Yeah yeah yeah. But beyond all that, if you just let me continue, what I’m trying to focus on, the big picture, is that if you’re willing to offer, in perfectly good faith, significant amounts of your hard earned cash as a reward for the killing of someone, like say a writer whose book you really didn’t like - even if most likely you didn’t actually read it yourself - the last thing that should happen in the long run is you get killed yourself!”

“And your man Rushdie the writer is still alive?”

“He is. Lots of other people got killed but he survived.”

“You could say it’s ironic.”

“Well yeah, I don’t know, maybe you could. But more than it being ironic, it’s totally unfair! It’s not what’s supposed to happen!”

“The world can be very strange.”

“And unjust!”