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Indian writer Salman Rushdie in 2010.
Photo:
stan honda/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The author
Salman Rushdie
was supposed to discuss the U.S. as a refuge for exiled writers. As he was about to begin Friday at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, a man rushed the stage and stabbed Mr. Rushdie in the neck. A 24-year-old,
Hadi Matar,
is in custody. His motive wasn’t clear.
But Mr. Rushdie has spent decades facing precisely this kind of threat. In 1989 the ayatollah of Iran issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Mr. Rushdie for allegedly insulting Islam with his novel “The Satanic Verses.” Mr. Rushdie went into hiding for years but had lived more openly in New York in recent years. Perhaps he was beginning to hope that it all had faded into history.
Iranian hardliners celebrated the attack Friday on social media. “This deserves congratulation,” one wrote on
Twitter,
according to the translation by the
New York Times.
“God willing, we will celebrate Salman Rushdie going to hell soon.” Another wrote that the attacker was a member of “Islam’s soldiers without borders.” If that’s true it would hardly be surprising.
This week federal prosecutors charged
Shahram Poursafi,
a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, with plotting to kill former National Security Adviser
John Bolton.
Mr. Poursafi provided a U.S. informant with details of Mr. Bolton’s schedule that “do not appear to have been publicly available.” He also said there was a second target after Mr. Bolton.
Masih Alinejad,
a human rights activist who is also a U.S. citizen, wrote in these pages that she was targeted in Brooklyn by an agent of Iran. “This time their objective was to kill you,” she says an FBI agent told her. “We detained him with a loaded AK-47.”
President Biden, meantime, is still trying to revive President
Obama’s
bad Iran nuclear deal. Even putting aside for a moment the merits of that negotiation, how can the U.S. sit across the table with such a regime and expect it to keep its word?
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Appeared in the August 13, 2022, print edition.
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