SIR Salman Rushdie is back in the news. His book Midnight's Children, set during the 1947 partition of India, has received a Booker award for being the best book to have been booked for a Booker award. Or something like that.

Rushdie has also threatened a former British Special Branch officer with libel proceedings. The officer was one of many funded by British taxpayers to protect Rushdie after he received death threats in the late 1980s arising from his novel The Satanic Verses. That novel offended many for its lewd references to religious Biblical and Koranic figures, including Abraham and the wives of the prophet Muhammad.

Jews and Christians were quite restrained in their condemnation of the book. Sadly, a minority of loudmouth Muslims found in the book an excellent excuse to whip up enough hysteria to make their co-religionists into an international laughing stock. The late Ayatollah Khomeini was keen to gain political mileage for his allegedly Islamic revolution by calling for Rushdie to be given a rushed death.

This violently imbecilic response from even some Western Muslims was an affront to free speech, including freedom to offend and collectively lampoon religious sentiment. Overnight, Rushdie became a pin-up boy for a loose coalition of free-speech campaigners and sectarian bigots.

Rushdie lapped up the hysteria, projecting himself as a living martyr to free speech. He happily accepted lavish security arrangements offered by his adopted country to save him from violent religious fundamentalists, at a cost to British taxpayers of millions of pounds.