Author Salman Rushdie attacked on lecture stage in New York

[Auburn85 432]

https://apnews.com/article/salman-rushdie-attacked-9eae99aea82cb0d39628851ecd42227a

 

(CHAUTAUQUA, N.Y. (AP) — Salman Rushdie, the author whose novel “The Satanic Verses” drew death threats from Iran’s leader in the 1980s, was attacked and apparently stabbed in the neck Friday by a man who rushed the stage as he was about to give a lecture in western New York.

A bloodied Rushdie, 75, was flown to a hospital. His condition was not immediately known. His agent, Andrew Wylie, said the writer was undergoing surgery, but he had no other details.

An Associated Press reporter witnessed a man confront Rushdie on stage at the Chautauqua Institution and punch or stab him 10 to 15 times as he was being introduced. The author was pushed or fell to the floor, and the man was arrested.

Authorities did not immediately identify the attacker or offer any information on his motive.

State police said Rushdie was apparently stabbed in the neck. Gov. Kathy Hochul said later that he was alive and “getting the care he needs.”

Dr. Martin Haskell, a physician who was among those who rushed to help, described Rushdie’s wounds as “serious but recoverable.”

 

Event moderator Henry Reese, a co-founder of an organization that offers residencies to writers facing persecution, was also attacked and suffered a minor head injury, police said. He and Rushdie were due to discuss the United States as a refuge for writers and other artists in exile.

Police said a state trooper was assigned to Rushdie’s lecture and made the arrest. But after the attack, some longtime visitors to the center questioned why there wasn’t tighter security for the event, given the decades of threats against Rushdie and a bounty on his head offering more than $3 million for anyone who kills him.

Rabbi Charles Savenor was among the roughly 2,500 people in the audience. Amid gasps, spectators were ushered out of the outdoor amphitheater.

The assailant ran onto the platform “and started pounding on Mr. Rushdie. At first you’re like, ‘What’s going on?’ And then it became abundantly clear in a few seconds that he was being beaten,” Savenor said. He said the attack lasted about 20 seconds.

Another spectator, Kathleen Jones, said the attacker was dressed in black, with a black mask.

“We thought perhaps it was part of a stunt to show that there’s still a lot of controversy around this author. But it became evident in a few seconds” that it wasn’t, she said.

Rushdie has been a prominent spokesman for free expression and liberal causes. He is a former president of PEN America, which said it was “reeling from shock and horror” at the attack.

“We can think of no comparable incident of a public violent attack on a literary writer on American soil,” CEO Suzanne Nossel said in a statement.

Rushdie’s 1988 novel was viewed as blasphemous by many Muslims, who saw a character as an insult to the Prophet Muhammad, among other objections. Across the Muslim world, often-violent protests erupted against Rushdie, who was born in India to a Muslim family.

At least 45 people were killed in riots over the book, including 12 people in Rushdie’s hometown of Mumbai. In 1991, a Japanese translator of the book was stabbed to death and an Italian translator survived a knife attack. In 1993, the book’s Norwegian publisher was shot three times and survived.

The book was banned in Iran, where the late leader Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death. Khomeini died that same year.

Iran’s current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has never issued a fatwa of his own withdrawing the edict, though Iran in recent years hasn’t focused on the writer.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday’s attack, which led a night news bulletin on Iranian state television.

The death threats and bounty led Rushdie to go into hiding under a British government protection program, which included a round-the-clock armed guard. Rushdie emerged after nine years of seclusion and cautiously resumed more public appearances, maintaining his outspoken criticism of religious extremism overall.

He said in a 2012 talk in New York that terrorism is really the art of fear.

“The only way you can defeat it is by deciding not to be afraid,” he said.

Anti-Rushdie sentiment has lingered long after Khomeini’s decree. The Index on Censorship, an organization promoting free expression, said money was raised to boost the reward for his killing as recently as 2016.

An Associated Press journalist who went to the Tehran office of the 15 Khordad Foundation, which put up the millions for the bounty on Rushdie, found it closed Friday night on the Iranian weekend. No one answered calls to its listed telephone number.

In 2012, Rushdie published a memoir, “Joseph Anton,” about the fatwa. The title came from the pseudonym Rushdie had used while in hiding.

Rushdie rose to prominence with his Booker Prize-winning 1981 novel “Midnight’s Children,” but his name became known around the world after “The Satanic Verses.”

Widely regarded as one of Britain’s finest living writers, Rushdie was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2008 and earlier this year was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor, a royal accolade for people who have made a major contribution to the arts, science or public life.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted that he was “appalled” that Rushdie was stabbed “while exercising a right we should never cease to defend.”

The Chautauqua Institution, about 55 miles southwest of Buffalo in a rural corner of New York, has served for more than a century as a place for reflection and spiritual guidance. Visitors don’t pass through metal detectors or undergo bag checks. Most people leave the doors to their century-old cottages unlocked at night.

The Chautauqua center is known for its summertime lecture series, where Rushdie has spoken before.

___

Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz and Hillel Italie in New York City; Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, New York; Michael Hill in Albany, New York; and Nasser Karimi and Mehdi Fattahi in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.)

[homersapien 11,390]

No Security? 

So much for the U.S. being a refuge for writers in exile.

[CoffeeTiger 5,133]

 

No Security? 

So much for the U.S. being a refuge for writers in exile.

He had a police officer assigned to him which took the attacker down eventually, but yeah, sounds like security may not have been 'top notch' for this event. 

Edited August 12, 2022 by CoffeeTiger

[jj3jordan 2,056]

Authorities didn't identify the assailant or motive.  Maybe the fatwa by the ayatollah? You think? $3M bounty?

[aubiefifty 16,814]

 

Authorities didn't identify the assailant or motive.  Maybe the fatwa by the ayatollah? You think? $3M bounty?

cat stevens even said he had to die and he would do his part. i am not sure if he ever recanted all that mess but i have had no use for theman. in fact he can take his somg peace train and shove it up his rear end because he is just talking out both sides of his mouth if you get right down to it.

[AUDub 11,153]

 

No Security? 

So much for the U.S. being a refuge for writers in exile.

To be fair there's no place on earth truly safe for Salman Rushdie. 

[AUDub 11,153]

 

Authorities didn't identify the assailant or motive.  Maybe the fatwa by the ayatollah? 

He was ID'd yesterday, and the motive is obvious. He's Shia and sympathetic to Iran. 

[icanthearyou 4,463]

 

cat stevens even said he had to die and he would do his part. i am not sure if he ever recanted all that mess but i have had no use for theman. in fact he can take his somg peace train and shove it up his rear end because he is just talking out both sides of his mouth if you get right down to it.

If you allow the worst words or, the worst act of a person to solely define that person,,, none of us are worthy of any love, or grace, or mercy.

Religious people who come to value a worldly leader, a worldly concept of their religious "law" over the call to love, will make mistakes, often horrific ones.

He has recanted but, he has never (to my knowledge) made any statement of apology.  That leaves me skeptical also.  However, he did condemn the 911 attacks and donated money to the families of the victims.  For me, his saving grace is,,, he is friends with Dolly.  I love Dolly.

[aubiefifty 16,814]

 

If you allow the worst words or, the worst act of a person to solely define that person,,, none of us are worthy of any love, or grace, or mercy.

Religious people who come to value a worldly leader, a worldly concept of their religious "law" over the call to love, will make mistakes, often horrific ones.

He has recanted but, he has never (to my knowledge) made any statement of apology.  That leaves me skeptical also.  However, he did condemn the 911 attacks and donated money to the families of the victims.  For me, his saving grace is,,, he is friends with Dolly.  I love Dolly.

thanks ichy i did not know that and i feel better about him. he was supposed to be about peace and love and him wanting a human murdered just struck me on all kinds of wrong.

[icanthearyou 4,463]

 

thanks ichy i did not know that and i feel better about him. he was supposed to be about peace and love and him wanting a human murdered just struck me on all kinds of wrong.

Me too. 

I just believe we all sometimes lose true religion within the bounds of worldly religion.  I think he had a moment of worldly religion and, he should apologize.

[Auburn85 432]

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/salman-rushdie-describes-moment-stabbed-162133489.html

 

 

Quote

 

Salman Rushdie describes moment he was stabbed onstage: ‘So it’s you. Here you are’

 

Salman Rushdie has for the first time opened up about the 2022 knife attack that nearly claimed his life.

The author, 76, was repeatedly stabbed while preparing to deliver a lecture on free speech at the Chautauqua Institution in New York two years ago.

The attack took place after a fatwa - assassination order - was placed on the author’s head in 1989 for what was considered in parts of the Islamic world as blasphemous content in his novel, The Satanic Verses.

 

While this fatwa was removed, the threats against the author’s life persisted, and he has now revealed how he felt when he met his would-be assassin.

“So it’s you. Here you are,” the author recalled thinking. “It felt like something coming out of the distant past and trying to drag me back in time, if you like, back into that distant past, in order to kill me.”

Rushdie offended parts of the Islamic world with his 1988 novel, which included derogatory depictions of the Prophet Muhammed.

He was ultimately forced into hiding as a result, but eventually stepped back into the public eye again, believing that any serious threats against his life were in the past.

Hadi Matar, then 24, is accused of attacking Rushdie and has been held without bail since the August 2022 attack.

While he has pled not guilty to the charges against him, he has admitted to disliking the author because of his treatment of Islam.

He said: “I don’t like the person. I don’t think he’s a very good person.

“He’s someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the belief systems.”

Rushdie’s interview comes ahead of the release of his new memoir about the attack, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.

Reading from the new memoir, the Booker Prize winner said: “In the corner of my right eye – the last thing my right eye would ever see – I saw the man in black running toward me down the right-hand side of the seating area. Black clothes, black face mask. He was coming in hard and low. A squat missile.

“I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, ‘So it’s you. Here you are.’”

After the attack, Rushdie remained in hospital for six weeks. “One of the surgeons who had saved my life said to me, ‘First you were really unlucky and then you were really lucky’. I said, ‘What’s the lucky part?’ and he said ‘Well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife’,” Rushdie told Anderson Cooper on CBS’s 60 Minutes in his first television interview since the attack.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is being released on 16 April.