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Bloody details of Salman Rushdie stabbing on NY stage by New Jersey man with fake driver’s license

August 13, 2022 | | Print Article

The man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie at an event Friday in Chautauqua, New York has been identified as Hadi Matar, a New Jersey resident with Shia sympathies.

“A preliminary law enforcement review of Matar’s social media accounts shows he is sympathetic to Shia extremism and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps causes. … There are no definitive links to the IRGC but the initial assessment indicates he is sympathetic to the Iranian government group,” station WNBC reported.

Shia refers to one of two sects of Islam. The other sect, Sunni, is far more prevalent throughout the world, with Shia Muslims mainly being confined to a few nations, including Iran.

According to an unconfirmed report from Belgian politician Darya Safai, the suspect was found in possession of a fake driver’s license that listed him as “Hassan Mughniyah.”

Except that “Hassan Mughniyah” is no made-up  name. It reportedly references a senior Hezbollah official who’s close to the IRGC:

Hezbollah is a Shia terrorist group based out of Lebanon.

“Since the 1980s, the IRGC have been linked to Hezbollah, offering training and funding to the primarily Lebanon-based terrorist organization. Hezbollah’s logo is based on the IRGC’s,” according to the Daily Mail.

All this is highly relevant because Iranians hate Rushdie with a vengeance, to the point that then-Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a still-active fatwa against him in 1989.

The fatwa stems from his publication of a book, “The Satanic Verses,” that Muslims say is blasphemous.

“Since the publication of The Satanic Verses in September 1988, the British-Indian writer who won the Booker Prize for his Midnight’s Children (1981) has faced innumerable threats to his life. On February 14, 1989, Iran’s religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa on Rushdie for ‘insulting Islam’ with his novel,” according to The Indian Express.

“The repercussions of this would continue to be felt for decades to come. Even as Rushdie went into hiding following the fatwa, book bans, book burnings, firebombings and death threats continued unabated for years to come, raising important questions about freedom of expression in the arts around the world.”

And indeed, as news of Rushdie being stabbed spread, celebration reportedly erupted in Iran:

Rushdie, meanwhile, remains on a ventilator and cannot speak.

“The news is not good. Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged,” the author’s agent, Andrew Wylie, said in a statement released around 7:00 pm Friday evening.

According to the Associated Press, Rushdie was on stage at an event early Friday morning when Matar rushed the stage and began stabbing him.

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

What happened to Rushdie also matters because it comes amid the Biden administration’s attempts to court favor with the Iranian regime so that it can reinstitute former President Barack Hussein Obama’s widely panned nuclear pact.

It also comes amid reports that the administration had purposefully hidden an Iran-backed assassination plot against former National Security Advisor John Bolton, lest its deal-making be affected.

The plot came to light this week when the administration charged a member of the IRGC for trying to hire someone to kill Bolton.

“The Justice Department unsealed the indictment against Shahram Poursafi two days after negotiators in Vienna settled on a ‘final text’ of an agreement, with all parties now consulting in their capitals on whether to consent to it,” the New York Post notes.

This suggests the administration had kept the assassination plot secret “to keep alive ongoing talks about re-entering the 2015 nuclear deal, former US officials tell The Post.”

Vivek Saxena
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