It's been a day when our minds have been on much more serious things - tragic death (possible murder?) of a href="http://www.blogger.com/%20http://www.mmail.com.my/content/8388-death-teoh-beng-hock-mystery-waiting-be-solved"political aide Teoh Beng Hock/a, and a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2009/07/200971754853355138.html"bombings in Jakarta/a.br /br /Nevertheless, I had a little outrage left for a href="http://www.mmail.com.my/content/8366-upset-open-sale-salman-rushdie-books"this reader's letter in span style="font-style: italic;"The Malay Mail/span today/a, asking why Salman Rushdie's books are sold in MPH when :br /span style="font-style: italic;"/spanblockquotespan style="font-style: italic;"... they are banned in most Muslim countries./span/blockquote(Unspecified, of course!!)br /br /The unnamed MPH spokesman gives a very conciliatory answer and passes the buck to distributor Pansing.br /br /If this bloke had wandered into my bookstore, I'd have told him to check in his bigotry and ignorance at the customer service counter. If I were a newspaper editor, I wouldn't have wasted column inches on him.br /br /The fact is Rushdie's books span style="font-weight: bold;"are not banned in Malaysia/span with the exception of span style="font-style: italic;"The Satanic Verses/span (although everyone who wants to read it can easily lay their hands on a copy). There is no earthly reason for them to be.br /br /And the rest of us should stand up firmly against the very suggestion that books should disappear from the shelves.br /br /I'm an extremist? You betcha. But I only read books. I don't plant bombs or throw young men out of windows. (Outrage is better saved for those people.)br /br /As for whether Rushdie's books apart from span style="font-style: italic;"The Satanic Verses/span are banned in other countries - I suspect not but I need to dig around to find the actual evidence. And certainly there is a move span style="text-decoration: underline;"/spana href="http://www.gulfnews.com/nation/Heritage_and_Culture/10242826.html"towards greater tolerance and away from book banning in the UAE/a [a href="http://www.complete-review.com/saloon/archive/200809a.htm"via/a].br /br /While we're getting angry with things in span style="font-style: italic;"The Malay Mail/span, let me ask you (since I feel like playing teacher today) if you can spot the grammar error in this sentence :br /span style="font-style: italic;"blockquoteA leading light of the abolish English for science and maths campaign has a new book./blockquote/span The article goes on to talk about how the Higher Education Ministry and the Malaysian National Institute of Translation (MNIT) a href="http://www.mmail.com.my/content/8384-third-eye-must-be-consistent-national-laureate"will hold a road show nationwide to promote A. Samad Said's book/a, span style="font-style: italic;"Bisik Warna/span. The Deputy Higher Education Minister calls it :br /span style="font-style: italic;"blockquote...a work of arts (sic) and words from the national laureate on life, organisations, leaders and philosophy .../blockquote/spanThe (sic) proving that the journalist who wrote the column can spot someone else's ouchy grammar error, even if they can't see their own.br /br /Congrats to Pak Samad anyway, and it is good to see a book getting so much official support.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7912730-3404183014721890655?l=thebookaholic.blogspot.com'//div
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