By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

“Cowards die a thousand times before their death” had said the English bard William Shakespeare in one of his plays, and the most prominent example of a scared-cat of our times is the sentenced apostate Salman Rushdie, who according to reports was severely beaten and probably stabbed in New York on Friday for his unforgiveable sin, whose consequences he has been trying to avert for the past 33 years by hiding in rat-holes in Britain and the US.
He may survive with the loss of an eye, say the medics – if they manage to defer his plunge into the fires of Hell for the moment.
It is not important whether the Indian-born British author of the blasphemous novel “The Satanic Verses” dies these days or lives for a few more years before the eventual end of his miserable life.
What is important is the courage of American Muslim, Hadi Matar, who had volunteered to be the executor of the apostate, fully aware of tasting a valiant death if the trigger-happy US policemen were to fire upon him.
They didn’t and he has survived to suffer imprisonment for some years, along with torture and all sorts of accusations, some of which his captors have already labeled by tampering with his cellphone which has been inserted with sympathies for the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and pictures of Martyr General Qassem Soleimani, in a vain attempt to implicate Iran in the incident at the Chautauqua Institution.
The 24-year old Matar is not of Iranian origin, neither he is on the payroll of the vengeance squads of the Islamic Republic resolved to bring to justice terrorists such as Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo, nor Tehran was aware of the existence of such a devout Muslim on American soil whose heart aspired to win a place in the hall of fame of the valiant.
Thus, it is nothing but avowed enmity of the Zionist-controlled western media to try to influence Washington’s mischievous stance on the nuclear talks with Islamic Iran, which is nonetheless proud to be the place where in 1989 the Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (RA), had issued the dynamic fatwa (religious edict), after Rushdie’s blasphemous book had spilled the innocent blood of at least 45 Muslims in India and Pakistan.
Here it would not be out of context to clarify the enlightened laws of the Shari’ah regarding apostasy.
An apostate, if he/she happens to be a convert to Islam, is not sentenced to capital punishment, and is given three chances to repent and return to the Islamic fold, but in the case of an apostate born of Muslim parents and brought up as a Muslim (like Salman Rushdie), execution is the only verdict and no apology is accepted, since repentance, if sincere and from the death of the heart in such a case, is a matter solely concerning Divine Mercy after death.
So “Joseph Anton” – the Anglicized name the self-confessed apostate Rushdie has used since 2012 while in hiding – should at least be brave in his anti-Islamic life and submit to justice, instead of trying to avert the end of mortal life like a coward who dies a thousand deaths out of fear of death which is inescapable.
The western regimes (the US, Britain, France, and others) are advised not to hamper the course of justice by spending hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, of the hard-earned money of their taxpayers in trying in vain to protect sentenced apostates and unpardonable terrorists.
To sum up, let us recall the words of the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, who a few years ago described Imam Khomeini’s irrevocable fatwa against Rushdie: “Fired like a bullet that won’t rest until it hits its target.”