Salman Rushdie to live under police protection for several years. On 7 March 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke diplomatic relations over the Rushdie controversy. When, on BBC Radio 4, he was asked for a response to the threat, Rushdie said, "Frankly, I wish I had written a more critical book," and 'I'm very sad that it should have happened. It's not true that this book is a blasphemy against Islam. I doubt very much that Khomeini or anyone else in Iran has read the book or more than selected extracts out of context.' Later, he wrote that he was "proud,
The Satanic Verses controversy in January 1989 when some of its members organised a public book-burning of "The Satanic Verses", evoking as the journalist Robert Winder recalled "images of medieval (not to mention Nazi) intolerance". In February, when the US edition was published, a new round of reviews and criticism began. March 1989 saw it banned in Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Singapore. The last nation to ban the book was Venezuela, in June 1989. In the United States, the FBI was notified of 78 threats to bookstores in early March 1989, thought to be a small proportion of the total number of threats.