You Looking at Me?

Glancing at the front cover of The Times the other day, it struck me that there is a fantastic and potentially highly lucrative business opportunity for companies like Cabbage Patch Kids® in places such as Tehran and Islamabad. Forget ‘Preemies’ and ‘Newborns’; they should be making cute little Bushes, Blairs and Rushdies. I don’t think that being flame retardant would be an especially strong selling point, though.

More seriously, just why does the Western media do it? Do we need to see yet another pack of clearly demented bigots waving their idiotic banners and burning really, really badly made rag dolls? Do we honestly need to waste good column inches reporting the mindless rantings of such luminaries as the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman or the Pakistan's religious affairs minister?

So, Pakistan has passed a resolution saying the honour was an attempt to "hurt the feelings of Muslims" and Iran says the award was intended to provoke the Islamic world. I am afraid that Messrs. Ebrahim Rahimpour & Ejaz ul-Haq are flattering themselves. Consideration for their feelings never entered the equation, and nor should it. Salmon Rushdie’s knighthood was based purely on literary merit. It may be an archaic honour but it is a matter for the British Government.

For some reason, the whole episode reminds me of a marvellous exchange in Casablanca:

Ugarte:   You despise me, don't you?
Rick:       If I gave you any thought I probably would.

PS: just as an afterthought, one wonders what will happen when Salmon Rushdie is nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

PPS: My good friend and school chum Gideon Mitchell was strangely enthusiastic about my posting this blog.