Counterterrorism Blog

I recently wrote about how actor Omar Sharif was threatened with death by Islamic radicals after he played St. Peter in an Italian TV film and spoke glowingly of the role.  In response to Sharif's comments, a message on a web forum used by al-Qaeda in the past linked to a website that threatened Sharif's life.  "Omar Sharif has stated that he has embraced the crusader idolatry," the website said.  "He is a crusader who is offending Islam and Muslims and receiving applause from the Italian people.  I give you this advice, brothers, you must kill him."

In the blog entry, I stated that while this is a minor incident in the grand scheme of things, it provides a glimpse of our enemies' single-minded fanaticism, and is part of a disturbing trend of people being threatened, and sometimes even killed, because radical Muslims found their speech offensive.  Here, I'd like to document this trend:

• Probably the best known example is the fatwa issued against author Salman Rushdie in 1989.  After Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, Ayatollah Khomeini read a fatwa on Radio Tehran calling the book "blasphemous against Islam" and declaring Rushdie to be an apostate -- which is punishable by death.  Khomeini called on "zealous Muslims" to execute Rushdie and the book's publishers.  Not only did Iran place a $3 million bounty on Rushdie's head, but there were also many actual acts of violence following the book's publication.  The Wikipedia entry on Salman Rushdie explains:  "At the University of California at Berkeley, bookstores carrying the book were firebombed. . . .  Muslim communities throughout the world held public rallies in which copies of the book were burned.  In 1991, Rushdie's Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed and killed in Tokyo, and his Italian translator was beaten and stabbed in Milan.  In 1993, Rushdie's Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot and severely injured in an attack outside his house in Oslo.  Thirty-seven guests died when their hotel in Sivas, Turkey was burnt down by locals protesting against Aziz Nesin, Rushdie's Turkish translator."
• A little over a year ago, Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh was murdered after directing the film Submission, which was designed to dramatize the mistreatment of women born into Muslim families.  On November 2, 2004, van Gogh was shot six times by Mohammed Bouyeri while riding his bicycle to work, and Bouyeri then "slit his throat with a kitchen knife, severing Mr van Gogh's neck down to the backbone before impaling to his chest with the knife a five-page note threatening other public figures."  At his trial, Bouyeri stated, "I take complete responsibility for my actions.  I acted purely in the name of my religion.  I can assure you that one day, should I be set free, I would do the same, exactly the same."
• One of the public figures threatened in the note stuck to van Gogh's body was Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, van Gogh's collaborator on Submission.  Following these threats, Hirsi Ali had to go into a period of extended hiding.  While she has now emerged, she lives under heavy guard.
• Also in the Netherlands, in January 2005 Moroccan-Dutch painter Rachid Ben Ali went into hiding after he received death threats for satirical work criticizing violence by Islamic militants.

• In 2002, the deputy governor of Zamfara state in Nigeria issued a fatwa calling for the death of journalist Isioma Daniel for her suggestion that, had Prophet Muhammad been alive, he may have wanted to marry one of the beauty queens at the 2002 Miss World pageant.  After Daniel's article, riots by Muslim youths left more than 100 dead and 500 injured, and pageant organizers were forced to move it out of Nigeria.  Daniel appears to be living in hiding to this day.
• Author Khalid Duran wrote a 2001 book called Children of Abraham:  An Introduction to Islam for Jews for the American Jewish Committee.  As explained by Daniel Pipes, the Council on American-Islamic Relations issued two press releases insulting Duran and demanding that his book be withheld until a group of academics recommended by CAIR could review his manuscript for "stereotypical or inaccurate content."  Following CAIR's press releases, a number of Islamic publications -- none of which had actually seen Duran's book -- attacked it for spreading "anti-Muslim propaganda" and "distort[ing] Islamic concepts."  By early June, 'Abd al-Mun'im Abu Zant, a powerful Islamist leader in Jordan, declared that Duran "should be regarded as an apostate" and called for a fatwa that "religiously condones Duran's death."
• Journalist Jeremy Reynalds's life was threatened on the Al Ansar web forum in February 2005.  On that web foum, a person who ran the defunct mawsuat.com website blamed Reynalds for the site's demise, posted a P.O. box address for Reynalds, and asked if anyone had further information about him.  In the discussion that followed, the Islamists posted Reynalds's home address so that he could be "visited," posted a picture of him, posted a wish that his ribs should be broken, and then offered up prayers that Allah would deliver to them Reynalds's "fatty neck."
• A fatwa was issued against Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen after publication of her novel Lajja (Shame) in 1993, which depicted the persecution of Bangladesh's Hindu minority.  The Hindustan Times recently reported that Nasreen "had to leave the country overnight to save her life and his been on [the] run since then."
• In 2003, U.S.-based Sudanese author Kola Boof was sentenced to death for blasphemy by a Sudanese shariah court following publication of a book critical of the government's treatment of black women.  The court decreed that Boof would be beheaded if she ever returned to Sudan.
• In 1999, the Shari'ah Court of the UK issued a fatwa sentencing playwright Terrence McNally to death after his play, Corpus Christi -- which depicted Jesus and his followers as a group of homosexuals -- opened in London.  (The Islamic court carefully stated, however, that the order could only be carried out by an Islamic state.  The judge, Omar Bakri Muhammad, said, "We would warn individual Muslims not to try to carry it out."
• Earlier this year, I uncovered a password-protected Arabic-language website, Barsomyat.com, that systematically tracked Christians who were active in debating Muslims on the PalTalk internet chat service.  Barsomyat.com featured pictures and information about these Christians, made efforts to track down their addresses, and openly threatened them with physical violence.

Unfortunately, we in the West haven't always been vigilant about standing behind speech rights.  In many of the above cases, many Westerners bent over backwards to make excuses for the Islamists who threatened free speech with death.  I've also written recently about the spread of religious vilification laws in the West, which send the wrong message to Islamists by telling them that the slander of a religion can be punishable by law.  Standing up for free speech in the face of religious fanaticism should be a no-brainer for anybody who understands the classical liberal principles that Western society was built upon.  It seems that many Westerners either fail to understand these principles, or else fail to grasp the reality of the threat.

Thanks to Raphael Satter of the excellent IQRA blog for his research assistance.