Butters is cooler than this guy. Butters.

Truely a beautiful, peace loving, religion.

We are teetering ever closer to this being our story...

When the non-elite, non-smart (i.e., sheep-like and stupid) people realize they can no longer affect change at the ballot box, I would not be surprised to see them acting out with anger and frustration.

Winter is coming.

@2 it has less to do with the religion but rather what nut jobs desperate for power do with it. You probably don't know any Iranians but they take these Fawtas about as seriously as most Americans take Falwell's stupidity. It's funny that the dudes who violently protested the Innocence of Muslims video thought it was sanctioned by the US government, then here our own idiots think the all Muslims are defined by their governments and/or nutjobs.
I'm surprised Slog didn't cover a much goofier thing their government is doing: http://seattletimes.com/html/picturethis…
This has less to do with ridding Iran of dogs, more of creating a weapon to arrest political opponents.

I kinda hope they get Rushdie due to his anti-gun views, the irony of his unarmed ass getting beat to death or stabbed by Mudslime extremist would be quite delicious.

My guess it it would make him wish he owned a semiautomatic carbine in an intermediate caliber, or at the very least a pistol.

Winter is coming.

And the ignorant think America has censors in our press.

Which we do, but not the stuff they get angry about.

@6: Ha! Yes, that would be funny.

Really good first hand account by Rushdie in last week's New Yorker about the whole fatwa thing.

@6 & @8 so the best way to deal with people you disagree with is to beat or kill them? How's that any different than the Fatwa?

@9 that was super interesting. NPR has a great interview as well.

cowardly old dudes everywhere, all afraid of how the other ones will influence the youths.

Rushdie bores me, I'm sorry. Had an amazing international story 20 years ago, lived in hiding, and simply put, has lived a unique type of celebrity life since then. Poster boy for what's offensive to Muslims.

@10 why do you think God invented drones?

@6: You . . . uh . . . you don't really know what irony is, right? Like the irony of someone who believes "Thou shalt not kill" is a basic tenet of their religion while wishing death on someone? Now that's some irony.

I bet you hate cancerAIDS, but when you die from it, it won't be that ironic.

With the help of the Internet, Muslim faithful will eventually come to the conclusion that hypersensitivity over perceived or maliciously targeted disrespect of Muhammed does their communities enormous harm—social turmoil, lost productivity, injury and death to many caught up in demonstrations, and the disgust and enmity of other members of the world community.

But it really amazes me that people obviously capable of creating such a body of philosphizing and sermonizing as that embodied in any major world religion cannot simply conceive of their revered heros and heroines as inviolate (or perhaps Teflon-coated in modern terms) and therefore immune to whatever poor insults other humans can cook up.

Also, any god worth his or her salt ought to be able to laugh off or ignore anyone whose bowing and scraping isn't up to snuff. If they can't manage that, "omniscience" and "omnipotence" aren't actually worth much, now are they?

I can't decide what is more impressive about Salman Rushdie -- the fact that he somehow talked Padma into marrying him, or the fact that he trolled so many people so well.

Yeah, sad.

That a person tries to be intellectual about something and a group of extremists hound the life out of him day and night.

Terrible.

Never happen here though.

Right?

Never happen....right?

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!

I can think of nothing nice to say about Islam, Mohammad, or religion in general.

Every day I open the paper and read about some bombing or murder conducted in the name of the Muslim faith, I become more and more opposed to that religion.

Bailo, when you were always the first person hit in dodgeball every day, did you complain to your P.E. coach that your suffering was just like the Trail of Tears?

No. It IS mostly about religion. And in particular the Islamic faith and how it is structured.

Unlike most Christian hierarchical churches, Islam is a loose network of local Mullahs that have the power to issue edicts as the word of frigg'n God on a whim and there is no central authority to countermand them. There is no Pope or council of cardinals. It's almost viral in this regard. This is why Islam is so robust. But when you got a billion faithful, if only 1% of the faithful listen to crazy pants Ayatollah Jimmy, you STILL have a formidable army of a MILLION crazies to contend with... Crazies that believe they are acting on gods will. That is VERY powerful stuff.

Islam has not, and is structured so as it cannot, undergo the reform movements necessary to modernize in the way a secular modern society requires. Only practitioner to practitioner is that possible. And why that kind of modern viewpoint has only manifested largely in the west Where there already are secular traditions (you could argue under the technocratic Indonesian states to some degree).

There IS a problem with Religions and modern society. And that problem is magnified greatly in Islamic societies. And will continue to get worse as long as there is no on the ground popular reform movement. In fact most of the reforms have been backwards fundimentalist regressions.

Or it could just be that it’s an inherently repressive, violent and sexist religion that appeals to the cultural “values” of ugly, small minded, superstitious and hateful people. Talk about clinging to guns and “god”… Obama should have been looking at Iran when he said that, not Pennsylvania.

@24 - So kinda like Christianity, and Catholicism in particular. You know, with that entire Vatican City headed by a Pope who will always be male because women aren't good enough to be priests.

@25
Exactly!

Except in that it has been a few hundred years since the Catholic Church used its pulpits to actively encouraged its flock to burn embassies, murder Ambassadors and put bounties on the heads of authors, much less order that adulterers be stoned to death.

So maybe not quite exactly…

Am I the only one worried that people here think that 1% of a billion is a million?

@27
People here don't think.