Image: Reuters Berita 24 English - Salman Rushdie , who was born in India but lived in hiding for years because of his writing, was stabbe...
 |
| Image: Reuters |
Berita 24 English - Salman Rushdie, who was born in India but lived in hiding for years because of his writing, was stabbed in the neck and torso onstage at a lecture in New York state on Friday and flown to a hospital, police said.
After hours of surgery, Rushdie was on a ventilator and couldn't talk on Friday night. Writers and politicians from all over the world condemned the attack as a threat to freedom of speech.
In an email, his book agent, Andrew Wylie, said, "The news is not good." "Salman will probably lose one eye. The nerves in his arm were cut, and he was stabbed in the liver, which was hurt."
Rushdie, who is 75 years old, was getting ready to talk to hundreds of people at Chautauqua Institution in western New York about artistic freedom when a man rushed to the stage and lunged at the novelist, who has had a price on his head since the late 1980s.
When Rushdie fell to the floor, shocked people helped pull the man off of him. The attacker was caught by a New York State Police trooper who was there to keep the event safe. Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old man from Fairview, New Jersey, who bought a ticket to the event, was named by the police as the person who did it.
"I don't know where he came from, but a man jumped up on stage and started what looked like punching him in the chest and neck," said Bradley Fisher, who was in the audience. "People were yelling, screaming, and gasping."
Police said that a doctor in the crowd helped Rushdie until emergency help arrived. The event's host, Henry Reese, got a small cut on his head. The police said they were working with federal investigators to figure out why the shooting happened. They didn't say what kind of weapon was used.
Jake Sullivan, who is the White House's National Security Adviser, said that what happened was "appalling." He wrote on Twitter, "We're grateful to good people and first responders for helping him so quickly."
Rushdie was born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in Bombay, which is now called Mumbai. He then moved to the United Kingdom. His fourth book, "The Satanic Verses," has been a source of death threats for a long time.
Some Muslims said that the book had parts that were against Islam. When it came out in 1988, it was banned in many countries with a lot of Muslims.
A few months later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was the leader of Iran at the time, gave a fatwa, which is a religious order, telling Muslims to kill the author and anyone else who had anything to do with publishing the book because it was blasphemous.
Rushdie went into hiding for almost a decade. He said that his book was "pretty mild." Hitoshi Igarashi, who translated the book into Japanese, was killed in 1991. In 1998, the Iranian government said it would no longer back the fatwa. Since then, Rushdie has lived a pretty open life.
Some Iranian groups with ties to the government have raised millions of dollars as a reward for Rushdie's murder. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who took over as supreme leader after Khomeini, said in 2019 that the fatwa could not be changed.
In 2016, Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency and other news outlets gave money to add $600,000 to the reward. In its report about the attack on Friday, Fars called Rushdie a "apostate" who "insulted the prophet."
NOT YOUR TYPICAL WRITER
Rushdie wrote a book called "Joseph Anton" about his life in hiding while under the fatwa. This was the name he used while under police protection in Britain. The Booker Prize went to "Midnight's Children," his second book. "Victory City," his new book, will come out in February.
Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, said he was shocked that Rushdie was stabbed while exercising a right that should always be protected.
Rushdie was at the institution in western New York to talk about the U.S. giving asylum to artists in exile and being "a home for freedom of creative expression," according to the institution's website.
People who went to the Chautauqua Institution, which was started in the 1800s in a small lakeside town with the same name, said that there were no obvious security checks. Instead, staff checked people's passes to let them in.
An Algerian writer and human rights activist named Anour Rahmani was in the crowd. He said, "I thought we needed more protection there because Salman Rushdie is not a typical writer." "There is a fatwa against him because he is a writer."
Michael Hill, who is in charge of the institution, said at a news conference that they usually work with state and local police to keep events safe. He promised that the summer program would start up again soon.
Hill said, "Our whole goal is to bring people together in a world that has been too divided." "Giving up on its mission would be the worst thing Chautauqua could do, and I don't think Mr. Rushdie would want that either."
Rushdie moved to New York City in 2016 after becoming a U.S. citizen.
He calls himself a "lapsed Muslim" and "hard-line atheist." He has been a fierce critic of all religions and has spoken out against oppression in his home country of India, including when Prime Minister Narendra Modi led a Hindu-nationalist government.
Rushdie is a former president of PEN America, a group that fights for freedom of expression. The group said it was "reeling from shock and horror" at what it called the first time a writer in the United States had ever been attacked.
"Salman Rushdie has been a target for decades because of what he says, but he has never backed down," Suzanne Nossel, the head of PEN, said in the statement. She said that Rushdie had sent her an email earlier in the morning asking her to help move Ukrainian writers who were looking for a safe place to live.
