LAST MONTH, Islamic radicals threatened to kill actor and Muslim convert Omar Sharif. Sharif had recently played St. Peter in an Italian TV film and spoke highly of the role, saying that he "seemed to hear voices" during filming and that "it will be difficult for me to play other roles from now on." Although Sharif's comments seem innocuous, they prompted a death threat. According to the Adnkronos International news agency, a message on a web forum which has been used by al Qaeda in the past linked to another website that threatened Sharif's life. The website containing the threat said, "Omar Sharif has stated that he has embraced the crusader idolatry. He is a crusader who is offending Islam and Muslims and receiving applause from the Italian people. I give you this advice, brothers, you must kill him."
This incident is relatively minor in the grand scheme of the war against radical Islam, but telling. It provides another glimpse into the Islamists' single-minded fanaticism and their willingness to punish any type of ideological non-conformity.
THE THREAT AGAINST Sharif largely fell below the media's radar. Indeed, aside from a few high profile examples--such as the fatwa directed at Salman Rushdie after he published The Satanic Verses and last year's slaying of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh--the mainstream media has given little coverage to the widespread Islamist assault against free speech.
While the public has not forgotten the Rushdie fatwa, our collective memory of the incident's seriousness has faded. In
fact, a number of physical attacks connected with the fatwa occurred in the West. The Wikipedia entry on Salman Rushdie explains:
At the University of California at Berkeley, bookstores carrying [The Satanic Verses] were firebombed. . . . Muslim communities throughout the world held public rallies in which copies of the book were burned. In 1991, Rushdie's Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed and killed in Tokyo, and his Italian translator was beaten and stabbed in Milan. In 1993, Rushdie's Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot and severely injured in an attack outside his house in Oslo. Thirty-seven guests died when their hotel in Sivas, Turkey was burnt down by locals protesting against Aziz Nesin, Rushdie's Turkish translator.
The van Gogh murder further extended this battle against free speech. Shortly before his death, van Gogh directed a film called Submission, which was designed to dramatize the mistreatment of women born into Muslim families. In response, Islamic radical Mohammed Bouyeri murdered van Gogh on November 2, 2004, shooting him six times before slitting van Gogh's throat with a kitchen knife and then using the knife to impale a five-page note to his chest.
While the Rushdie and van Gogh incidents are the two most prominent attacks on critics of Islam in the last two decades, they are only part of a broader trend. The note that Bouyeri gruesomely tacked to Theo van Gogh's chest also threatened Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch MP from a Somali Muslim background. By that time, however, death threats were old hat to Hirsi Ali. She has said in an interview that she was living underground just weeks before her 2003 election to the Dutch parliament because of comments she had made in a televised debate.
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