Older, but no wiser

The most extraordinary and deeply worrying thing about the whole Salman Rushdie knighthood affair is that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of those concerned that giving a high honour – to be bestowed by Her Majesty The Queen, no less - to an author whose works have, rightly or wrongly, been perceived as containing the grossest of insults to Islam, might, just might, upset a few people.

Whether or not their original reaction to Rushdie’s infamous book has any justification isn’t the point; the Islamic world’s reaction to his knighthood was surely so predictable as to be blindingly obvious? Of course it would be interpreted as another insult. Just what planet do these people inhabit?