Martyrs for Rushdie

There will always be an interest in the fatwa against Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses, and there should be. It is an indicator of extreme cultural conflict that the West needs to study more closely in order to understand these factions we find ourselves currently embattled against. The Times Online has a story about uncovering the tomb of the "first martyr" killed in the pursuit of Salman Rushdie:

A SIMPLE grey slab in Tehran’s Behesht Zahra cemetery, resting place to thousands of Iranian soldiers killed in the war with Iraq, holds the clue to a conundrum.
The symbolic empty shrine bears the words: “Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh, born Conakry, Guinea. Martyred in London, August 3, 1989. The first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie.”

Although the name Mazeh, the alias of an unknown 21-year-old Lebanese, will be familiar to students of Islamic terrorism, the inscription appears to confirm an assassination attempt that has never been admitted by the British security services.

His shrine stands in an area dedicated to foreign terrorists or “martyrs”. On one side is a monument to the assassins of President Sadat of Egypt, on the other a young Palestinian mother who killed herself in a suicide bombing is commemorated. Near by, two anonymous bombers who killed 241 American and 58 French troops in Lebanon in 1983 are lauded.

Yet all that is known about Mazeh is that he met his death priming a book bomb in a Paddington hotel room.

At an inquest in January 1990, Scotland Yard’s antiterrorist squad had noted only that there was “a hint” that Mazeh belonged to a terrorist group, saying that his reason for being in London was “not clear”. Although Rushdie was mentioned in an initial claim, police had no evidence of a link. Israel claimed that he was planning an attack on its London embassy.

British security services have never owned up to what they know of Mazeh, or given details of any assassination attempt against Rushdie in Britain.

The Booker Prize winner became a cause célèbre in 1989 after Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual founder of Iran’s Islamic Republic, issued a fatwa against him following the publication of The Satanic Verses. Accusing Rushdie of blasphemy, Khomeini exhorted Muslims to kill the author. A $2.5 million bounty was put on his head, forcing Rushdie to go into hiding with round-the-clock protection.