Salman Rushdie faces another Iranian death decree

Forty state-run media outlets in Iran have pooled together to raise $600,000 (£420,000) to add to the fatwa on writer Salman Rushdie, 27 years after Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, called for Rushdie’s assassination following the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.

That bounty would be in addition to the $3 million pledged in February 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Fars News Agency, which is affiliated with Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was one of the largest contributor to the bounty-nearly $30,000.

Shahin Gobadi of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) has said: “This once again clearly shows that terrorism is intertwined with the very existence of this regime as one of the pillars of its survival”. Iranian religious organization had then offered $ 2.7 million to anyone who would apply this fatwa. Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death outside his office at Tsukuba University north of Tokyo, while Italian translator Ettore Capriolo survived being stabbed at his apartment in Milan, the New York Times reported in 1991.

Author Salman Rushdie arrives at the “Midnight’s Children” Premiere at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival at Roy Thomson Hall on September 9, 2012 in Toronto, Canada. The announcement sparked an worldwide outcry and resulted in the breaking of diplomatic relations between Iran and the United Kingdom for nearly a decade.

Iran’s former President Mohammad Khatami said the threat against Rushdie was “finished” in 1998, but the fatwa has never been officially lifted. Rushdie was also put under police protection by the British government and went into hiding for several years.

Last year, the Islamic Republic cancelled its appearance at the Frankfurt Book Fair after Rushdie was announced as a speaker.

For some free speech advocates, the Rushdie affair – and the weak global response to it – laid the groundwork for subsequent efforts by Islamic governments to outlaw what they view as blasphemy, or speech “defamatory” of Islam.