April 1989, Page 12

Words to Remember—The Salman Rushdie Affair

Ayatollah Rubollah Khomeini:

"He must be killed." (Feb. 15, 1989)

Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani:

"We are prepared to follow our own path at any cost." (Feb. 21, 1989)

Iranian President Ali Khamenei:

"Rushdie's problem has no solution ... An arrow has been shot toward its target and it is now traveling toward its goal." (Feb. 22, 1989)

Ali Akbar Velayati, Iranian foreign minister:

"In the future this will be our stand toward any country that attacks Islam and Islamic sanctities." (Feb. 28, 1989)

Salman Rushdie:

"The thing that is most disturbing is that they are talking about a book that doesn't exist. The book that is worth killing people for and burning flags for is not the book that I wrote. The people who demonstrated in Pakistan and who were killed haven't actually read the book because it isn't on sale there." (Feb. 14, 1989)

President George Bush:

"However offensive that book may be, inciting murder and offering rewards for its perpetration are deeply offensive to the norms of civilized behavior." (Feb. 28, 1989)

The British Foreign Office:

"It is for Iran to decide whether she wants normal relations. If she does she must renounce the use or threat of violence against citizens of other countries." (Feb. 28, 1989)

Commonwealth Secretary General Shridath Ramphal:

"It is important that those in authority in Iran should recognize that in this matter of direction and rewarding the killing of Salman Rushdie, they had neither support nor acquiescence from the rest of the world, but resentment." (Feb. 22, 1989)

Gennadi I. Gerasimov, Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman:

"The situation that has emerged around the book by Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, causes grave concern to the Soviet leadership... Unless a reasonable solution is found, the implications could really be unpredictable ... The Soviet side pined the impression that the Iranian government is sincere in seeking a settlement of the situation and believes that the Soviet Union could have a positive role to play." (Feb. 28, 1989)

Dawud Assail, president, Council of Mosques, USA:

"The Muslim leadership condemns the Khomeini death threats." (March 3, 1989)

Liaqat Hussain, general secretary, Council of Mosques, UK

"We ask Muslims to keep within the law and to use democratic ways of protest." (Feb. 24, 1989)

Dr. Zazi Badawi, chairman of the Imams and Muslims Council, UK:

"Ninety percent of the mosques believe that their members should have respect for the public laws of this country. Any incitement to violence would be contrary to our faith ... If you go into any library you can find worse books about Islam, and Christianity for that matter." (Feb. 24, 1989)

Cat Stevens, now Yussuf Islam, former British pop star:

"The Quran makes it clear if someone defames the Prophet, then he must die... (Feb. 24, 1989)

Alireza Jaffarzadeh, Washington, DC, office, Iranian People's Mujahedin (Iranian opposition party):

"This whole affair must be viewed not in religious terms but in light of what is happening in Iran. The simple fact is that Khomeini needs a crisis in order to cling to power a little longer ... The book was published some time ago. Only after it became clear that there was widespread reaction against it did Khomeini get involved. He saw it as a way to create yet another crisis and keep himself in power a bit longer." (Feb. 24, 1989)

Kayhan International, Iranian newspaper:

"This was not a bounty hunt but a question of faith and honor ... Those tactics are exceptionally poor and ridiculous methods and speak more of domestic political opportunism than a real desire to defend the faith ... The upshot of this is that Mossad or perhaps Baghdad will terminate the man, and Iran will pay the political price." (Feb. 20, 1989)

Hezbollah, Iranian-funded Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim extremist group:

"Hezbollah will do its utmost to carry out this great honorable order." (Feb. 25, 1989)

Ahmed Jebril, leader of the Syrian and Iranian-funded Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command:

"We in the PFLP-GC will confront this new conspiracy and work to execute the legal action against Rushdie." (March 5, 1989)

Charles Redman, US State Department spokesman:

"Jebril's statement highlights the menace posed by the PFLP-GC and the group's association with Iran's state-sponsored terrorism. This terrorist group is based in Damascus, and the government of Syria has an obligation to exercise control over the group's actions." (March 6, 1989)

Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Washington Post

"The odds on the assassination of Rushdie are given by one intelligence specialist at better than even. If Khomeini manages to have the novelist murdered, he would send the world down a dark corridor toward an unknowable future." (Feb. 24, 1989)

L'Osservatore Romano:

"Millions of Muslims have been offended by the Rushdie novel. The very attachment to our own faith induces us to deplore that which is irreverent and blasphemous in the book's contents. It should not, however, be difficult to understand that the sacredness of the religious conscience of every individual cannot be set apart from the sacredness of the life of other men. The solidarity of those who have felt wounded in their dignity must be accompanied by a pressing vow to abandon attitudes of hate that also sound like offenses to God." (March 5, 1989)

Rabbi Wolfe Kelman, Director, American Section, World Jewish Congress:

"More than any other religion, Jews can sympathize with the pain of devout Muslims [at what they perceive] as a distortion and caricature of their fundamental beliefs. . . Our experience has also taught us that the proper response to such perceived distortion or defamation is dialogue and education, not violence and assassination." (Feb. 25, 1989)

Roald Dahl, British author:

"Clearly he has profound knowledge of the Muslim religion and its people and he must have been totally aware of the deep and violent feelings his book would stir up among devout Muslims. In other words, he knew exactly what he was doing and he cannot plead otherwise. This kind of sensationalism does indeed get an indifferent book to the top of the bestseller list, but in my mind it is a cheap way of doing it." (Feb. 28, 1989)

Henry Mitchell, Washington Post:

"Suppose that author had written a novel in which the central point was that African Americans will never be part of the main society and should be deported or slaughtered? Would we then insist that freedom of speech is paramount, or that every book, no matter how asinine or wicked, is a holy object? ... We know from our own history the destructive power of religious fanaticism ... As recently as three centuries ago, however, the fathers of most Americans (still in England) saw nothing wrong in hanging, burning, or otherwise disposing of blasphemers, and doing it legally ... When we consider the ayatollah, however, we do not ignore or excuse in his present what we easily ignore and excuse in our past." (Feb. 24, 1989)

Dr.M.T. Mehdi, president of the National Council on Islamic Affairs and the American-Arab Relations Council:

"If a fiction about Moses or Jesus referred to these two prophets of God as 'Nero' or 'Hitler,' the Christians and Jews of the West would react as the Muslims of the East. [However] we disagree with Ayatollah Khomeini ordering the death of Salman Rushdie ... Khomeini is trying to make a 'martyr' out of Rushdie. We believe he should be ignored." (Feb. 14, 1989)

Ayatollah Jalal Ganje'i, founder of the Iranian League for the Defense of Democracy and Independence:

"None of Khomeini's policies today are in any way religious or Islamic. They are all political policies taken with the purpose of keeping the regime in power ... The death threat issued by Khomeini... is not acceptable within the view of Islam. It must be condemned with respect to the Rushdie book, or the work of any other writer. They all must be viewed with complete tolerance ... The dignity of the religion of Islam is far above distraction by such petty issues. (Feb. 24, 1989)