They will not stop demanding and there will be no reasoning with them.;)

He hasn't been hiding the whole time. What happened was when he didn't die he started to just live his life and basically its understood that the fatwah is null at the moment since nobody seems to have gone very far in pursuing it. He isn't hiding behind money. He's not one of those types. His books are interesting and very rich in cultural influences and very complex characters. The Satanic Verses got him in trouble with the Muslims for the same reason the Danish cartoons were controlversial: much of the orthodoxy didn't like the interpretation of Islam.

That aside he deserves the knighthood for being such a brilliant author. He's better than half the bozos who get knighted anyway.

I have The Satanic Verses and have read Midnight's Children and some of his other works. But the thing I most remembered that he wrote was about the boundaries of cultures and how it was in this area of cultural overlap that "newness" enters the world. So kudos to Sir Salman. Regarding Pakistan. With Waziristan and the Pushtun lands of the Northwest Frontier a defacto safe haven for Taliban & al-Qaeda, The ISI links to the aforementioned and opium smugglers, the increasing militancy of Islamists in Pakistan and their progress at the ballot box, we could be seeing the rise of a freely elected Islamist government with nuclear weapons sooner than we think.

What is wrong with taking a person by his words? Or judging him by the ideas he follows?

Yep. Something like a secular Islam (the euro-Islam Brussel hopes for if only corrupting Muslims long enough by exposing them to western living style :) )) is impossible to be acchieved with Muhammad's Islam. You can't be secular and truly Islamic at the same time. See the raising tensions in Turkey, the conflict between the secular "burgeois" elite, and the conservative majority of the simple people and the population in the rural areas. What you see there is the braking-lose of an inner conflicting contradiction that have been surpressed by force since decades. You could also mention Marocco. Algeria. Somalia. Egypt. Saudi-Arabia. Pakistan. Iran.

Integration? As a matter of fact in Germany, Holland, france, England you maike exactly the opposite observation: in all these countries, especially the third generation of Muslim immigrants tend to be far more orthodox and in favour of conservativism than their parents of the first generation. Euro-Islam simply is a myth, it either is Islam - or non-Islam. It cannot be any different, because Muhammad designed this system exactly with this goal in mind: preventing weaknesses to fall for other ideas, in order to persevere his power, and prevent his followers from leaving him and his claim for leadership alone. Every totalitarian ideology tries that. The lacking tolerance for other groups, cultures, ideas, religions, is owed to this attempt of keeping Islam's power united and intact, and to prevent that others could be seen as worthy enough not to attack and subjugate them. Raising artifical concepts of enemies one needs to defeat! That'S why even the idea of seeing certain people as dhimmis - is only a system of systematic discrimination that leaves the dhimmis nevertheless open for exploitation, concerning their skills and knowledge, for example, and calling this discrimination and exploitation "protection". In Grenada, for example, massive use was made of this: the myth of the well-meaning Islamic rulers (in fact some of the most brutal and opppressive of their time) saving ancient Greek and christian scriptures that otherwise would have gone lost. The real history is a bit different: the Islamic rulers were asked to alloow that these things may be saved, and copied, and they allowed it. That essentially is all. The knowledge contained in this treasure of arts, philosophy and theology payed off for the islamic rulers in improving their administrative skills and finance management, for example. Altruism and friendly attitude had nothing to do with it, and the effort to save those scripts had to be conducted by the Jews and Christians themselves anyway. They also payed for the resulting costs. so here you have the story of how much europe owes islam for having saved it's heritage: it was self-interest, with Islam taking the cream, but not contributing much more to the effort than giving permission to start the work. the service of Islam is that it refrained from preventing the dhimmis to save some of their cultural heritage - and this today has grown to this monumental myth of how very much europe owes to Islam for actively having saved it's cultural basis and traditon.

Is somebody already a noble gentleman just because he refrains from keep on kicking somebody he already has thrown down to the ground in an act of agression?

Enough anti-Muslim sentiment for now. Let's talk about something else for awhile.