Reward for Killing Taslima Nasrin is $2400

What is wrong with True Believers? Today, clerics in eastern India offered a cash reward of 100,000 rupees ($2,400) to anyone who murders TASLIMA NASRIN. This is really appealing to easy money greed, since the beautiful TASLIMA is an unarmed helpless woman without guards, army or police protection. She does not even have a political protector or the aegis of the Press. The Death Warrant is also money-grubbing on the part of the mosques, since her life is worth, frankly, millions.

TASLIMA is a writer. Novels, little stories. The novels barely touch upon any "religious" criticism. She certainly does not criticize clerics with the passion exercised by Mohammed against pretenders. Her life is worth more than Bin Laden. If the clerics seriously want to appeal to money greed, and they clearly are, surely there are a thousand money-grubbing clerics to kill a thousand Bin Laden's for the $50 million dollar reward, before even one would kill TASLIMA. They should offer at least $100 million to kill an unarmed woman.

What decent self-respecting warrior would kill an unarmed woman for less? Especially when a righteous warrior would be willing to fight honorably against a formidable and dangerous opponent for free?

I can just see the expression on the faces of the brave jihadists in heaven. And their astonishment when they come across this woman-killer among the peerage of valiant Warriors: "Ah, here is Hussein who killed the Great Devil. And Saladin, lived for years in combat against hordes of heavily-armed Crusaders. Yes. Oh, and you? What? You murdered an unarmed woman who was writing stories? For Money? Well, was it for a Lot of Money? No? Just 100,000 rupees! [Big Pause.] Do you know how that makes US look? Do you think that the Great Warriors of Heaven are assassins of women for money?"

Clearly some of the Mullahs are so deeply depraved, so caught up in hatred, they cannot be trusted to understand their own instincts. Their greed, their hysteria, their wild jeering at a person who has done them no harm, and is harmless, their need for a scapegoat in the crisis of their own management of the mosques....

The life of one TASLIMA NASRIN is worth so much more. Alive or dead, for she will never die. Never. Never. She has already entered into the pantheon. She is not threatening the clerics, not with stones or guns. She has terrified them with understanding and courage.