Iran condemns Britain over Rushdie knighthood

[Undertoad]

And it spreads:

ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Outrage mounted in the Muslim world Wednesday over Britain's knighthood for Salman Rushdie, with protests spreading to Malaysia and a top Pakistani cleric calling for the novelist to be killed.
...
In Islamabad, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, one of two brothers who runs the hardline Red Mosque, backed comments by Pakistan's religious affairs minister that the knighthood justified suicide attacks by Muslims.

"Salman Rushdie deserves to be killed and anyone who has the power must kill him," Ghazi said in a statement. He added that if the Pakistani government cooperated "we will make arrangements to murder... Rushdie here."

Around 300 female Islamists wearing all-covering burqas and waving flags and placards blocked the road outside the Pakistani parliament.

"He is not a famous writer, why has he been given such a rare title? This is really a move against Muslims," said Samia Raheel Qazi, an MP and head of the women's wing of the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami party.

Another 300 people torched an effigy of Rushdie in the southern city of Karachi, while hundreds more burned British flags and dummies of the writer in the central city of Multan.

The funny part of this article is at the end:

...the committee that recommended Rushdie for the honour did not discuss possible political ramifications and never imagined it would provoke Muslim anger.

It also said that the writers' organisation that led the lobbying for him to be knighted had originally hoped the honour would lead to better relations between Britain and Asia.

Emphasis mine. The calculus of political correctness is getting more and more difficult, eh?