The former Kuwaiti information minister said on the 9/11 anniversary that Muslims should condemn terrorist Osama bin Laden with the same energy they expended on the fatwa against Salman Rushdie:

Tefla said much damage has been caused to Muslims because the world is contrasting Muslims’ tepid approach to bin Laden to their overwhelming response in the 1980s to British author Salman Rushdie and his controversial book “The Satanic Verses.”

Against Rushdie, Tefla wrote, “We rattled and sharpened all of our rhetorical sabers, our religious legal rulings [fatwa], [alerted] our guards, our ports, our airports and our border crossings in order to prevent his entering [our countries] and the distribution of his book, since it does damage to Islam.”…

“Have we earmarked a reward for anyone who kills bin Laden as we did for anyone who kills Rushdie on account of his book?