Little has been heard from the renowned and notorious novelist Salman Rushdie since Aug. 12, 2022, the day that he was stabbed 15 times and severely injured while onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York.
But now he has given his first interview since the attack.
The man who attacked, Hadi Matar, explained why he did it in no uncertain terms: “I respect the ayatollah. I think he’s a great person.” But Rushdie? Not so much: “I don’t like the person,” Matar said, referring to his victim. “I don’t think he’s a very good person. I don’t like him. I don’t like him very much. He’s someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the belief systems.”
So here is someone who stabs a man who has a death sentence on his head for insulting Islam, and who expresses his admiration for the person who issued the death sentence, and his disdain for his victim because he “attacked Islam,” and despite all this, the UK’s Daily Mail repeated the words we have heard so very often about Islamic jihadis: “Matar’s motive for the attack remains unclear.”
Matar’s motive “remains unclear”? It was never unclear in the first place. It remains unclear to those who have no knowledge of the fatwa against Rushdie or of the death sentence for blasphemy in Islamic law. It remains unclear to those terminally blinkered Westerners who insist, in the teeth of ever-mounting death counts, that Islam is a religion of peace that couldn’t possibly contain any teachings that would move someone such as Hadi Matar to try to kill Salman Rushdie. But it is not now and has never been unclear to those who are willing to face reality.
This denial and willful ignorance is dangerous, because it fosters complacency in the face of a genuine threat. But the Daily Mail, and Western society in general, will likely not realize that until it is far too late for them.