The mullahs issued their fatwa against Salman Rushdie 19 years ago today, a date he memorialized in The Ground Beneath Her Feet in a scene just as bloody as the inception of the holiday. It’s hard not to read the scene as a metaphor for both the jihadis and the unwanted press:

On St. Valentine’s Day, 1989, the last day of her life, the legendary popular singer Vina Apsara woke sobbing from a dream of human sacrifice in which she had been the intended victim. Bare-torsoed men resembling the actor Christopher Plummer had been gripping her by the wrists and ankles. Her body was splayed out, naked and writhing, over a polished stone bearing the graven image of the snakebird Quetzalcoatl. The open mouth of the plumed serpent surrounded a dark hollow scooped out of the stone, and although her own mouth was stretched wide by her screams the only noise she could hear was the popping of flashbulbs; but before they could slit her throat, before her lifeblood could bubble into that terrible cup, she awoke at noon in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico, in an unfamiliar bed with a half-dead stranger by her side, a naked mestizo male in his early twenties, identified in the interminable press coverage that followed the catastrophe as Raúl Páramo, the playboy heir of a well-known local construction baron…

And a bloody Valentine’s Day to you too.

Related posts: Ceci n’est pas une ass, Rushdie issues fatwa against own books, Add Anuvab Pal to the pantheon: Another ‘Fatwa’ in Manhattan