June 21, 2007	Thursday	Jamadi-us-Sani 05, 1428

LONDON, June 20: The British media seems to understand why Muslims the world over are angry on Salman Rushdie’s knighthood, but it is livid over the remarks of Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Religious Affairs Ijazul Haq who is reported to have reacted by saying that such actions justified suicide bombings.

The Daily Telegraph’s Andrew Marr is so angry at Ijazul Haq that in his Wednesday Notebook ( If Pakistan is so angry, give back our aid) he said if Pakistan is so offended there is a dignified way to deal with the problem. Return the aid which Britain has given to Pakistan.

“If this (British aid) is tainted money, it can presumably be returned,” he suggested.

He, however, said Pakistanis have every right to voice their anger at the award of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie.

“Equally, the rest of us have every right to express our anger at the deeply offensive response of Ijazul Haq, Pakistan’s religious affairs minister, has made,” said the Andrew Marr.

The same newspaper in its editorial on Tuesday complained: “Mohammed Ijazul Haq may have been forced to ‘clarify’ his inflammatory suggestion that suicide bombing was an appropriate response to the Rushdie knighthood, but the Pakistan government has, as yet, offered no official condemnation of his statement.”

The editorial also said: “Conservative MP Paul Goodman, whose constituency of High Wycombe has a high proportion of Muslim voters, has accused the government of failing to get to grips with incitement to terrorism.”

The Guardian in its Wednesday edition said the committee that recommended Salman Rushdie for a knighthood did not discuss any possible political ramifications and never imagined that the award would provoke the furious response.

It also emerged that the writers’ organisation that led the lobbying for the author of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses to be knighted had originally hoped that the honour would lead to better relations between Britain and Asia.

Rushdie is not commenting on the latest threats to his life. It is understood he is anxious not to inflame the situation. Scotland Yard declined to comment as a matter of policy on whether the writer has been given police protection.

The arts and media committee that proposed him for a knighthood was chaired by Lord Rothschild, the investment banker and former chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery. The other committee members are Jenny Abramsky, the BBC’s director of radio and music; novelist and poet Ben Okri, who is vice-president of the English chapter of PEN International, which campaigns on behalf of writers who face persecution; Andreas Whittam Smith, former editor of the Independent; John Gross, the author and former theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph; and two permanent secretaries, one from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and one from the Scottish executive.

Mr Whittam Smith said it would be for the main committee to assess any other aspects of the honour. The Foreign Office is represented on the main committee by the permanent secretary, whose job it would be to raise any potential international ramifications. A Foreign Office spokesman said he was not aware of any request by the honours committee to gauge likely Muslim reaction to the knighthood before the decision was taken.

However, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Kurshid Kasuri said on a visit to Washington that Britain could not have been surprised by the outrage.

The chairman of the all-party group on Pakistan, the Conservative MP Stewart Jackson, also attacked the decision to knight Rushdie. “We do not need a situation where we are gratuitously offending our allies in the fight against terror,” he told the ePolitix website. “I think the prime minister’s office should think very carefully about that decision.”