One of the principal tenets of manliness is this: The world isn’t fair. Let’s acknowledge it and use the tools at hand to make the best of it. But here’s another important tenet: If you pay the price of your own foolishness, don’t complain about the unfairness of it. Remember Jim Croce’s lyric? “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask of the old Lone Ranger and you don’t mess around with Jim.”

OK, let’s take a look at a hodge-podge collision of foolish and unfair events.

Back in 1988, Salman Rushdie wrote a book called “The Satanic Verses.” Evidently Rushdie found inspiration for his book in an ancient tradition holding that Mohammad included a couple of verses in the Koran that were delivered by Satan rather than the angel Gabriel. Mohammad, being soundly chastised, later repudiated these so-called Satanic Verses and the whole embarrassing affair was papered over. Rushdie’s fertile, eccentric mind seized on this apparent miscue and a wildly controversial novel was born.

Let me pause here to anticipate a comment. Someone might say Rushdie’s decision to write this book was foolish. It might be argued that he should anticipate that a book like this would generate a massive backlash and he has no one but himself to blame for the tsunami that washed over his creative head.

That may be so. But I suspect that Rushdie was overwhelmed by his muse. I think he wrote it because he “couldn’t not write it.” But that’s really beside the point of this column. Before moving on, though, I should stress that I agree with Rushdie when he says, “It’s very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.”

Apparently some important Muslim clerics declined to employ the simple expedient of shutting the book and allowed themselves to be hysterically offended. On Valentine’s Day 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini called for Rushdie’s death and a $2.5 million bounty was placed on his head.

Enter Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh. At least that’s what he called himself. We don’t know his real name. But he seems to have been a 21-year-old Lebanese believed to be a member of Hezbollah. Anyway, of all the ways he could register his outrage over Rushdie’s book, he decided to make a bomb and blow the author to bits. You may disagree with me, but this scenario presents a smorgasbord of unfairness and foolishness.

But, of course, there’s more. Evidently Mazeh wasn’t a very good bomb maker. While priming the device in London on Aug. 3, 1989, he blew his own self to bits along with two floors of the Beverly House Hotel. This, of course, is a foolish and unfair outcome.

Now some might regard Mazeh as a foolish fanatic and grossly incompetent terrorist. Still others in the Muslim world regard him as a hero. His mother was offered a home in Iran and he is recognized as “The first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie.” A shrine was erected to his honor in Tehran near shrines dedicated to the assassins of Anwar Sadat, a young Palestinian mother who killed herself in a suicide bombing and the anonymous bombers who killed 241 Americans in Lebanon in 1983.

All this insane foolishness with the expected destructive consequences has been on my mind this week as June 14 marks the 44th anniversary of the day the Vatican abolished the Index of Prohibited Books. This index included the works of some of the world’s great philosophers, scientists and novelists. Many of the men and women whose works appear on this index were threatened with death by clerics who wouldn’t “just shut the book.” Indeed, some died agonizing deaths for daring to pen ideas that religious authorities found offensive.

I may be going out on a limb here, but I think I’m safe in saying that any manly man in possession of his faculties would say killing people is a grossly unfair and foolish way to deal with people who write offensive books.

Oh, by the way, on June 19, Rushdie will be 63 and, in 1998, the Iranian government informed Britain it would neither support not hinder assassination operations against him. By coincidence, June 17 is the anniversary of the day the Supreme Court ruled that Bible verses and prayer in school are unconstitutional. June 21 is the anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that flag burning is protected speech.

I’m Hink and I’ll see ya.