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Iranian Cleric Says Rushdie\'s Murder Could Stop Insults to Islam\'s Prophet

September 17, 2012, 6:42 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

As my colleague Michiko Kakutani explains in her review of Salman Rushdie's new memoir, an Iranian religious foundation reportedly raised the price on the author's head over the weekend to $3.3 million. The cleric who leads the foundation claimed that the novelist's murder would stop others from disrespecting Islam's founder, The Associated Press reported from Tehran.

The Indian-born author's book, “Joseph Anton,” describes the nine years he spent in hiding, after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced him to death in 1989, for basing a fictional character on the Prophet Muhammad in his novel “The Satanic Verses.” In an interview with BBC Radio 4 broadcast on Saturday, Mr. Rushdie spoke of th e parallels between the anger at his novel and the past week's violent protests by fundamentalist Muslims offended at the trailer for a crude film mocking the prophet posted on YouTube in July.

Although Mr. Rushdie resurfaced in 1998, after a reformist Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami, made it clear that his government had no intention of carrying out the death sentence, hardliners in Iran insist that the late Ayatollah Khomeini's religious edict, or fatwa, cannot be rescinded.

Ayatollah Hassan Saneii, an Iranian cleric whose foundation first offered millions for the murder of Mr. Rushdie more than a decade ago, said in a statement published on Sunday in the hard-line daily Jomhuri Islami: “As long as the exalted Imam Khomeini's historical fatwa against apostate Rushdie is not carried out, it won't be the last insult. If the fatwa had been carried out, later insults in the form of caricature, articles and films that have contin ued would have not happened.”

The senior cleric's comments echoed remarks made two days earlier by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, who said in a statement on the film, “this great and unforgivable sin would not have been committed,” if the United States and other countries “had refused to support the previous links in this evil chain - namely, Salman Rushdie, the Danish cartoonist and Koran-burning American pastors.”

Speaking to the BBC as protests unfolded across the Muslim world, Mr. Rushdie deplored the “extraordinary, thin-skinned, paranoid reaction” to “this idiotic video.” The author also described the crude biopic of Muhammad - which was apparently directed by a Coptic Christian extremist in California who duped actors into participating in the film by calling the main character “George” during the shoot - as “a piece of garbage that would be better named ans such and dismissed.” But, he added, “the idea that you react to that by holding an entire nation and its diplomatic representatives responsible for something which they weren't remotely aware of is ugly and wrong.”

The author also told the BBC: “The events surrounding ‘The Satanic Verses' created, I think, a climate of fear that has no dissipated, and that, I think, makes it harder for books - not even books critical of Islam… anything about Islam, to be published. This idea of respect, which is a code word for fear, is something that we have to overcome.”

Writing on Twitter over the weekend, Mr. Rushdie recommended an essay by William Saletan for Slate headlined, “Internet Videos Will Insult Your Religion. Get Over It.”

In the essay, Mr. Saletan observed:

To day, fury, violence, and bloodshed are consuming the Muslim world. Why? Because a bank fraud artist in California offered people $75 a day to come to his house and act out scenes that ostensibly had nothing to do with Islam. Then he replaced the audio, putting words in the actors' mouths, and stitched together the scenes to make an absurdly bad movie ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed. He put out flyers to promote the movie. Nobody-literally nobody-came to watch it.

Indeed, it does appear that the fury is over a film that might have disappeared without a ripple, if an Islamist television host in Egypt had not discovered it online and driven hundreds of thousands of viewers to the trailer on YouTube. Steve Klein, a Christian fundamentalist who claims to have acted as a consultant on the film, told Bloomberg News that no one came to the film's sole screening, at a cinema on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. “I got there about a half hour before the movie starte d and stayed a half hour after it started,” Mr. Klein told the news agency, “and I saw zero - nada, none, no people - go inside.”



Where Smartphones Lose Their Way, Navigation Services Step In

September 17, 2012, 2:43 pm
By JOHN R. QUAIN

In the battle between Google's Android smartphone and the Apple iPhone, free navigation is one of the most fiercely contested fronts. At least one area where Apple might have created a decisive advantage over Google has gone begging, however, in the latest generation of the iPhone, unveiled last week.

Apple's turn-by-turn navigation suffers from a flaw common to Android-based phones, in that when the cellular connection is lost, the route's instructions are lost as well.

To avoid this problem, dedicated apps like Scout Plus from TeleNav, at $9.99 for one year of service, download and store maps directly on the phone, so turn-by-turn instructions work with or without reliable cellular reception. On Monday, TeleNav announced a version, at $24.99 for one year, called Car Connect, that would allow drivers of Ford vehicles subscribed to the Sync service to connect their phones to the dash, where the maps could be displayed on the car's larger screen. Subscribers would also be able to use hands-free voice commands and hear directions through the car's audio system. In essence, the system frees the driver from looking down at the handset or fiddling with awkward cradles.

It is a significant development in an industry in which automakers have zealously guarded that in-dash real estate. The TeleNav approach means the navigation software can be downloaded once and used wherever a Sync-subscribed Ford may travel.

A company trying to revive its fortunes against Apple and Google is Nokia, a fading force in mobile phones that has hitched its star to the Windows operating system from Microsoft. The Nokia Windows Phone 8 handsets are not yet available for purchase, but j udging from demonstrations for the news media, one feature in particular should appeal to drivers. The handsets have built-in free maps and navigation based on the company's Navteq maps. And like the TeleNav approach, the maps live on the phone, not in the cloud, so the feature is impervious to the failings of weak or nonexistent signals.

Neither of these alternatives may ultimately dissuade die-hard Apple fans eager to get the iPhone 5. For their fealty, Apple has added a few wrinkles to its existing navigation software, including 3-D views of some metropolitan areas and a social networking feature. The company licensed maps from TomTom, a traffic-reporting service, and the social component from Waze, a developer of a traffic-reporting app.

The standalone Waze app, featured in Wheels, reflects the position and speed of other users on roads near you, delivering live traffic information and alerts about accidents and police speed traps. How this information is int egrated on the final version of the new Apple software is unclear because the iPhone 5 is not scheduled to be available at Apple retail stores until Friday.

Drivers who connect their iPhones to their cars, and who plan to upgrade to iPhone 5, are faced with a hardware purchase to make the connection. The plug, which has not changed since 2003, has been shrunk, and the new version is expected to require the purchase of a $29 adapter to work with speakers and docks that used the old plug.

The plug's evolution will also change how graphics, and therefore display information, are transmitted to connected displays, a byproduct of the so-called Lightning connector. That means that even with the adapter, the iPhone 5 would not fully cooperate with in-dash systems that are compatible with existing iPhones. Consequently, no iTunes graphics or video from the iPhone 5 would display on the car's in-dash screen.

While it would be tempting to fault Apple for going it alo ne, throughout the industry there is a lack of coordinated thinking on standards for the interaction of smartphones with in-car telematics. Ideally, drivers would be able to use one common connection to link their smartphones to their cars and operate compatible apps, like navigation, on the cars' displays. But that day is not approaching any time soon.

“We've got a fragmented market, and there's no single standard yet,” Niall Berkery, senior director of business development at TeleNav Automotive, said in an interview.



Protests Over Anti-Islam Film Taper Off, but Effects Linger

September 17, 2012, 2:45 pm
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

ITN television footage of the aftermath of protests in Afghanistan.

Protests against an anti-Islam film spilled into a second week on Monday, although they appeared to be tapering off in size and taking place in fewer countries compared with last week.

As my colleagues Matthew Rosenberg and Sangar Rahimi reported, hundreds of Afghans burned tires and threw rocks at the police during the unrest, which took place along the Jalalabad road that leads out of the capital, Kabul. At one point the protesters came close to scaling the walls of a major military base.

There were demonstrations and violence in more than 20 countries starting from l ast Tuesday, when the American ambassador in Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, was killed in an attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi. But even as the protests taper off, some say the backlash could take other forms.

Blake Hounshell, the managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, noted there could be more of what are known as insider, or green-on-blue, attacks in Afghanistan, for example - green being American military parlance for indigenous forces, blue for its own.

In Indonesia, the police fired tear gas and water cannons against hundreds of demonstrators outside of the American Embassy in Jakarta. In Pakistan, protests flared near the consulates in Karachi and Lahore, while in Islamabad, the American Embassy said it had halted public services. The embassy also noted that protests in Pakistan were often spontaneous and issued travel restrictions.

But some bloggers and writers suggested a growing weariness with the impetus generated by the anti-Islam film, while elsewhere people were being killed in drone strikes, in the war in Syria and in a factory fire in Pakistan. One Pakistani writer, Shiraz Hassan, noted that amid the protests over the film last week, hundreds of workers were killed in those fires last week.

The issue of censorship has also come up as governments, including that of the United States, tried to block the film's widespread dissemination. A Web site news editor, Jahanzaib Haque, wrote on his blog about how the unrest was fomented on social medi a but he, like others, condemned efforts to block YouTube.

Ali Dayan of Human Rights Watch wrote:

But the video was still providing grist in what my colleague David Kirkpatrick described over the weekend as having the potential to inspire local dynamics to fan the flames.

As word spread on social media about the protest activities, on Monday the largest outpouring of protest appeared to be the one organized by Hezbollah in Lebanon. Still, a journalist there, Lucy Kafanov, reported on her Twitter feed th at there was little violence.

An activist and writer, Mhamad Kleit, wrote that it was not just a Shiite protest, but that Sunni clerics, Christians and Druze were among the large turnout.



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