Terrorism The New Satans

The story thus far: British-Indian author Salman Rushdie, 41, is in hiding somewhere in England. He lives under a death threat imposed by the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who charges that Rushdie's new novel, The Satanic Verses, is blasphemous and an insult to Islam. For good measure, Iranians have offered a bounty of as much as $5.2 million to Rushdie's executioner. The world is stunned by the notion that the Iranian leader would issue a death threat against a British subject who has merely written a work of phantasmagoric fiction that, to be sure, occasionally deals with Islam in a fanciful and...