As reported today in the Independent, officials of a group called The Organization to Commemorate the Martyrs of the Muslim World said a £80,000 reward should be paid to anyone “able to execute the apostate Salman Rushdie.”

Well, as we can see, rationality has returned to the Middle East!!!

In today’s news, novelist Salman Rushdie has a price on his head, and it is a pretty penny. Inflamed by the British crown’s knighting of Rushdie, Iranian jihadists are offering nearly $160,000 for his murder.

In other disturbing Mid-East developments concerning Rushdie, Pakistani youth (yes, YOUTH) are burning effigies of Rushdie and the Queen, in protest that one of the greatest writers of our time, an avowed humanist, spoke ill of Islam in his 1998 book The Satanic Verses.

“If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so, unless the British government apologizes and withdraws the ’sir’ title,” said Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq.

Those, my friends, are the words of the Pakistani Religious Affairs Minister. That’s right, members of the Pakistani cabinet (allies of Bush Co.) are calling for suicide bombings against a fellow humanist!!!

And when asked at the New Humanism conference at Harvard in April what ever had become of that fatwa against him for writing The Satanic Verses, Rushdie commented that it was all thankfully behind him. How wrong he was.

Rushdie, an active humanist, is featured in the July/August edition of The Humanist magazine, on newsstands now.