Free Republic

The man who stabbed and partially blinded novelist Salman Rushdie onstage at a Western New York arts institute in 2022 was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday (May 16) for an attack that also wounded a second man, the district attorney said. Rushdie, 77, has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel "The Satanic Verses," which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran's supreme leader, denounced as blasphemous, leading to a call for Rushdie's death, an edict known as a fatwa. Hadi Matar, 27, a US citizen from Fairview, New Jersey, was found guilty of attacking the...

Hadi Matar finally went on trial Tuesday for attempting to murder the novelist Salman Rushdie back in Aug. 2022. There is little, if any, doubt about Matar’s guilt .. for he stabbed Rushdie multiple times in full view of a shocked crowd at the Chautauqua festival. .. Barone managed to delay the trial for over a year. Now that it has begun, both Barone and his opposite number, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt, seem curiously intent on preventing any discussion of Matar’s motive. Matar tried to kill the man who, at the time of the stabbing had carried for...

Choudary: Refuses to discuss his dissolute youth At 39, Anjem Choudary should be a symbol of success for his peers. Born into the working-class family of a market trader in Welling on the outskirts of London, he has risen - thanks to the opportunities offered by the British education system - to become a qualified lawyer. But it is unlikely his old school will be inviting him to be guest speaker on prize-giving day. Their former pupil is not famous for his elegant oratory in court. Instead, the articulate Mr Choudary preaches hatred and murder in the streets of Britain...

The latest honor for Salman Rushdie was a prize kept secret until minutes before he rose from his seat to accept it. On Tuesday night, the author received the first-ever Lifetime Disturbing the Peace Award, presented by the Vaclav Havel Center on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Only a handful of the more than 100 attendees had advance notice about Rushdie, whose whereabouts have largely been withheld from the general public since he was stabbed repeatedly in August of 2022 during a literary festival in Western New York. “I apologize for being a mystery guest,” Rushdie said Tuesday night after being...

Nearly six months after he was stabbed during a lecture in New York, author Salman Rushdie will be publishing a new book, “Victory City”, on Tuesday, Reuters reports. Rushdie, 75, was blinded in his right eye and his left hand was badly injured by the stabbing. After the attack, Rushdie was treated at a Pennsylvania hospital, where he was briefly put on a ventilator, his agent said last October. Rushdie's upcoming 15th novel will be published by Penguin Random House and takes the form of a translation of a mythical epic originally written in Sanskrit about the Vijayanagara Empire that...

Salman Rushdie’s agent says the author has lost sight in one eye and the use of a hand as he recovers from an attack from a man who rushed the stage at an August literary event in western New York, according to a published report. Literary agent Andrew Wylie told the Spanish language newspaper El Pais in an article published Saturday that Rushdie suffered three serious wounds to his neck and 15 more wounds to his chest and torso in the attack that took away sight in an eye and left a hand incapacitated. Rushdie, 75, spent years in hiding...

An Islamic studies academic dubbed the "Professor of Peace" at Oberlin College in Ohio endorsed the campaign to assassinate U.S. and British writer Salman Rushdie because the famous novelist depicted the Muslim prophet Muhammad irreverently. A 24-year-old man named Hadi Matar allegedly stabbed Rushdie on Friday in the neck and liver during the author’s speech in Chautauqua, New York. Rushdie is on a ventilator and cannot talk. According to law enforcement officials, Matar’s social media footprint showed that he was a fan of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization. Matar was also sympathetic to radical Shia...

Recently an Iran-inspired jihadist attempted to murder author Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed ten times and remains in critical condition. The origins of this crime go back to 1989, when the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa that promised millions of dollars (eventually $3.3 million), instant martyrdom, and a trip to paradise for anyone killed while murdering the apostate Rushdie, who allegedly insulted Islam in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. The subsequent response of the West to this grotesque violation of free speech exemplified the willful blindness to jihad that would characterize...

In the wake of the stabbing of famed author Salman Rushdie, an Iran newspaper whose editor is chosen by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei published an editorial threatening to assassinate former President Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The despotic theocratic regime in Iran, the largest state sponsor of terrorism on the planet, had already praised Hadi Matar, who allegedly stabbed Rushdie, the author who had a death warrant issued against him by the Iranian regime decades ago. The editorial in the Kayhan newspaper stated, “ … it is now the turn of Trump and Pompeo...

​Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Iran of inciting the knife attack on “The Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie​, blasting the regime as “despicable” Sunday. Blinken lauded Rushdie, 75, as more than a “literary giant.”​​​ The author has “consistently stood up for the universal rights of freedom of expression, freedom of religion or belief, and freedom of the press​,” the secretary of state said in a statement released on Sunday.​ “While law enforcement officials continue to investigate the attack, I am reminded of the pernicious forces that seek to undermine these rights, including through hate speech and incitement to violence​,”...

The attempted murder of author Salman Rushdie prompted social media users, including several members of Congress, to voice criticism of the Biden administration’s pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran in light of the country’s past support of a fatwa against Rushdie’s life. "Iran has offered a bounty to anyone who assassinates Salman Rushdie," Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted on Friday. "Today he was stabbed in America. Why is Biden still negotiating a ‘deal' with these terrorists in Tehran?"

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher commented on the attack on author Salman Rushdie and said that he doesn’t think the suspected attacker is Amish and “Islam is still a much more fundamentalist religion than any of the other religions in the world, and that means they take what’s in the holy book seriously and that has been dangerous for a long time. It’s still dangerous.” Maher stated, “We don’t know the motivation yet, but Sal did have some enemies in the past, as I recall. So, I’m guessing [suspect Hadi Matar] is not Amish. Sal…was...

British author JK Rowling has received a death threat from an Iran-backing Islamist extremist who appears to have praised Salman Rushdie's suspected attacker, repeatedly expressed support for Tehran's theocratic dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and branded Israel, Ukraine and India 'terrorist states'. The Harry Potter writer and free speech campaigner - who has been pilloried by trans activists for her beliefs on gender - had expressed her horror at the sickening attempt on Rushdie's life in upstate New York when she was issued the chilling threat on Twitter. Meer Asif Aziz, who describes himself on Twitter as a 'student, social activist,...

The man accused of stabbing author Salman Rushdie held a fake driver's license bearing the surname of an infamous Hezbollah commander, it has been claimed. That driver's license, which was was found on 24-year-old Hadi Mater bore the name Hassan Mughniyah. Both the first and second names are linked to infamous terrorist organization Hezbollah. The group's current leader is named Hassan Nasrallah. While one of the group's most notorious figures was Imad Mughniyeh, who was killed in a CIA-linked assassination in Syria in 2008. NBC New York reports that Mater's social media accounts showed that he was sympathetic to Shia...

New York State Police have identified the suspect in Friday's stabbing of novelist Salman Rushdie as a New Jersey man who, according to law enforcement sources, allegedly had 'sympathies toward the Iranian government.' Rushdie, 75, whose novel 'The Satanic Verses' drew death threats from Iran's leader in the 1980s, remained in surgery Friday evening hours after being stabbed up to 15 times by a man who rushed the stage as the author was about to give a lecture in western New York. Authorities confirmed that the attacker Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, was arrested at the scene and...

As we reported earlier, author Salman Rushdie was stabbed on Friday morning in Chautauqua, New York where he was about to give a lecture. He was on stage when a man dressed in black rushed onto the stage and began stabbing and beating him.That man has now been identified as Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey.JUST IN: Author Salman Rushdie's alleged attacker has been identified as 24-year-old Hadi Matar, officials say. Rushdie was stabbed "at least once in the neck and at least once in the abdomen." https://t.co/TML9Ty3QS0 pic.twitter.com/3W3xcZtZUs— ABC News (@ABC) August 12, 2022He was taken down by...

Rushdie on ventilator and may lose an eye, agent says Salman Rushdie is on a ventilator, unable to speak, and may lose an eye, his agent told Reuters and the New York Times.“The news is not good,” Andrew Wylie, Rushdie’s agent, said Friday evening. “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”

Author Salman Rushdie was stabbed during a speech in western New York on Friday morning and rushed to a hospital for treatment. Governor Kathy Hochul said at an afternoon event that he is alive and credited a state trooper with saving him. Rushdie was about to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua when a man rushed the stage and attacked him, the Associated Press reports. The assailant, who has not been identified, was subdued and detained by police. Rushdie was airlifted to a nearby hospital, according to a statement by state police that said the author had...

There is an incompatibility between Islam and the ideas which are fundamental to Western civilization. There are logical contradictions between the principles at the basis of Islam and the West. One cannot resolve logical contradictions, they cannot be solved in the way that problems can. You simply cannot square a circle. It’s got nothing to do with terrorists, or fundamentalists, fanatics, or Islamic radicals of various sorts. I’m here talking about mainstream Islam and the fact that it is in serious, direct and open contradiction with principles which are at the core of Western civilization and form the very...

A regime-affiliated religious foundation in Iran has boosted by $500,000 the bounty it had offered for the killing of British author Salman Rushdie to $3.3 million from $2.8 million, after protests around the world over alleged insults to the prophet Muhammad, who is considered holy in the Islamic world. The 15 Khordad Foundation reportedly will pay the higher bounty to whoever acts on a 1989 fatwa issued by Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which called for the death of Rushdie, the author of “The Satanic Verses,” because the novel was considered blasphemous to Muslims. Rushdie is also an apostate...