Ali Khameini, the ayatollah who succeeded Rujollah Khomeini as supreme leader of Iran, said in 1989 that the fatwa his predecessor had issued sentencing Salman Rushdie to death for considering ‘The Satanic Verses’ blasphemous was “an arrow [o una bala según otras traducciones] for which there is a target. It has been shot. One day, sooner or later, he will reach his goal.”
On Friday, 33 years after that fatwa and that phrase, the horror of its validity and its influence took shape in Chautauqua, the placid rural corner of western New York state where Hadi Matar, a young man of 24 years, repeatedly stabbed and seriously injured Rushdie as he was about to give a lecture at a cultural festival.
Although the investigation is still open and officially the New York authorities have not determined the motive that moved Matar, who on Saturday was charged with one count of attempted murder in the second degreewhich in New York can carry a sentence of up to 25 years in prison, his actions and the first reports about him have turned all eyes now on Tehran.
Hezbollah and Iran
Matar, who according to NBC News was born in California and had moved to New Jersey, is the son of emigrants from Yaroun, a city in southern Lebanon near the Israeli border that has been bombed in the past by the Israeli army in attacks on positions of Hezbollah, the Shiite militia backed by Iran.
As the expert in radical Islamism Romain Callet explained on Twitter, Matar was using a false New Jersey driver’s license with the name of one of the security chiefs and most prominent commanders of Hezbollah, who died in 2008 in Syria in an attack that Shiite militia, which this Saturday has refused to make statements about Matar to Reuters and has claimed not to know him, attributed to Israel.
In your activity on social networks, where your accounts are now inaccessible, Matar had also shown his sympathies with Shia extremism and with the causes of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.according to a police source quoted this Saturday by NBC, which ratifies information also given the day before by another source from the tabloid ‘New York Post’.
Celebration
The leaders of the theocratic government of Iran at the moment this Saturday publicly kept silent about the attack against Rushdie but both in media close to the regime in the country, as well as in Lebanon and other countries such as Iraq or Kuwait, on websites that support Hezbollah and in the opinions gathered in the streets by international agencies the Matar action has been celebrated and, in many cases, has been linked to the fatwa.
“Congratulations to this brave and duty-conscious man who attacked the apostate and depraved Salman Rushdie in New York,” he wrote, congratulating Matar ‘Kayhan’, the main ultra-conservative Iranian daily, whose director is appointed by Ayatollah Khameini, according to France. Presse, who has also collected the statements to the ultra-conservative Fars agency of theology professor Hosein Radai. “A person who departs from the religion of Islam (…) is called an apostate. He is someone like Salman Rushdie, who has not only rejected Islam [sino] who has tried to insult him. According to jurisprudence, such an apostate deserves death,” the Ayatollah said.
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On a pro-Hezbollah website seen by ‘The Guardian’ it was assured this Saturday that “whoever is hostile to us will be caught by the fire of our swords, even after a while”. The British daily also quoted a veteran Kuwaiti journalist, who has stated that Rushdie “should not expect Muslim worshipers to respect their right to life when he disrespected the essence of their lives and insulted their holy symbols.” He also picked up the headline that headed the coverage of the Iraqi organization Sabreen, which supports the pro-Iranian militias: “May peace be with you. God’s revenge.”
Condition
Matar did not accomplish the fatwa’s ultimate goal but a swift and furious attack, which required five men to hold him off until he was arrested, left Rushdie, 75, in serious condition. According to the last part provided on Friday by Andrew Wylie, the writer’s agent, after hours of surgery at the Erie (Pennsylvania) hospital to which he was transferred by helicopter, Rushdie was still on a ventilator and unable to speak. “The news is not good,” Wylie said. “Salman will probably lose an eye, nerves in his arm have been severed and his liver is stabbed and damaged.”
Case could complicate Biden’s attempts to revive Iran nuclear deal
Although the investigation into the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie is still ongoing and no link between Hadi Matar and Tehran has been proven, the political shock wave of the attack is already being felt in the United States, where what happened could further complicate the president’s attempts , Joe Biden, to reactivate the multilateral nuclear agreement with Iran that Barack Obama reached in 2015 and from which Donald Trump pulled the US in 2018.
The attack on the writer came days after the Justice Department charged an Iranian operative with plotting to assassinate John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser and fierce critic of the deal. It also comes on the heels of the recent arrest of a gunman suspected of being part of a plot to try to kidnap Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad, a plot allegedly orchestrated by Iranian intelligence for which four Iranians were charged last year.
Those developments have intensified calls for Biden from critics of the nuclear pact to abandon the negotiations.
The president has not commented on the attack on Rushdie at the moment, but his National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, issued a statement on Friday in which he assured: “this act of violence is appalling & rdquor ;.
In Iran, meanwhile, some feed conspiracy theories about the attack on the writer. Mohammed Marandi, adviser to the Iranian negotiating team, has done so. “Isn’t it a coincidence that just as we are about to reinvigorate the nuclear deal the US makes accusations about an assassination attempt on Bolton and then this happens? & rdquor ;, he wrote on Twitter.