Several times over the years, Iran's president Mohammed Khatami has said that the fatwa against British novelist Salman Rushdie is finished, ancient history, and can we please all move on. And every time, the country's hardliners — the Revolutionary Guard and Iran's "spiritual leader," ayatollah Ali Khamenei — contradict him, encouraging any Muslim with a hankering for blood and an eye on a 2.5-million-dollar reward to murder the apostate. Khamenei just did it again. For Iran, it's a perfect way to have its cake and eat it too: one official policy to appease the West, and a completely different official policy to satisfy the fundamentalist mobs at home.
Rushdie is about to enter his seventeenth year as a fugitive from the ayatollahs' "justice." Iran's good-cop-bad-cop routine is getting old. In a more literal sense, I hope we'll be able to say the same thing about the author.
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