Sharia and Death Fatwa alert. From Iranian.ws, with thanks to The Informed Christian:
Britain on Tuesday strongly condemned a UK-based Iranian exile TV presenter whose inflammatory broadcasts insulting Islam have provoked religious hardliners in Iran to call openly for his murder.
But in a case with echoes of the Iranian fatwa against British author Salman Rushdie, the British government hinted police were considering special protection for Manouchehr Fouladvand in view of the threats.
Clerics in Iran have not issued a religious edict, or fatwa, calling for Fouladvand’s murder, as Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini did in Rushdie’s case in 1989.
But his broadcasts on the U.S.-based Farsi-language Ma-TV, in which he frequently mocks the Prophet Muhammad and Islam’s holy book the Koran, have upset many Iranians and spurred hardline commentators to call for his death.
“The firing of a bullet into his damned and blasphemous head is an incontestable necessity, and how cherished is the emissary of that bullet,” Hossein Shariatmadari, editor-in-chief of the hardline Kayhan daily, said in an editorial.