Novelist Rushdie Gravely Injured by Likely Non-Reading Zealot Seeking Salvation and Bounty by Dave LIndorff!
(2022-08-14 at 03:52:10 )

Novelist Rushdie Gravely Injured by Likely Non-Reading Zealot Seeking Salvation and Bounty by Dave LIndorff!

A shiv for your thoughts:

As I am writing this it has been five hours since the cowardly attack on author Salman Rushdie, 75, by what almost certainly is a Islamic zealot who, motivated by the fatwah issued against Mr. Rushdie in 1989 by Muslim Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then leader of the theocratic Islamic state of Iran, stabbed him multiple times, including once in the neck and once in the abdomen.

The Khomeini fatwah, which offered a reward for the killing, for blasphemy, of Mr. Rushdie on account of his book The Satanic Verses. was later put in a kind of unofficial limbo by the Iranian government as it sought more acceptance in the international arena. Many experts on Islamic law noted though, that a fatwah can normally only be lifted by the religious leader who issues it, and Khomeini, for better or worse, at that point was dead and gone, having died the same year he issued it. (A $3.8-million reward is still on offer for his death by a private Iranian religious foundation.)

For nine years after the fatwah issuance, Mr. Rushdie was hidden and provided round-the-clock protection in the United Kingdom by the Metropolitan Police Special Branchs "A Unit." He divorced his wife, American novelist Marianne Wiggins, largely I suspect to protect her and their young son from being collateral damage in any attack on him.

The boy would be spirited by British police every month or so to whatever secret safe-house his father was in at the time, There, the latest chapter of a running story Mr. Rushdie told his son led to a fanciful and darkly humorous sci-fi fantasy novel, published as Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

About a storyteller who had lost the "gift of gab," as Mr. Rushdie himself must have felt during his period of hiding, and his skeptical so. (Really an adult book disguised as a childrens book, I read the entire book to my rapt nine-year-old son at bedtime. Whenever I would doze off he would shake me and say, "Read! read!")

Mr. Rushdie eventually eased cautiously back into the public sphere and seemed to have left the fatwah behind him, though there continued to be occasional threats made against him and against those who published his work.

This attack by a man in a mask rushing the stage at the Chautauqua Institute in Western New York just as Rushdie was being introduced, was a surprise, though there was a State Police Trooper standing nearby for security, who was able to immediately arrest the assailant.

I hope that Mr. Rushdie, who was rushed by helicopter ambulance to a hospital after being treated at the scene, is okay. A neck wound, particularly by knife, can be deadly if it severs a carotid artery, and is in an area of the body where it would be difficult to stanch the bleeding, suggesting that this was no amateur who attacked, but someone knowledgeable in the deadly art of assassination. He was also stabbed in the abdomen, the blade piercing his liver, had the nerves to his left arm severed, and reportedly may lose an eye. He is currently on a ventilator and so cannot speak.

But besides reporting on the little that is known at this early point, even as to the condition and recovery prospects of stabbed author, I want to say something about the work that resulted in his becoming a hunted man sought out by pathological islamic zealots greedy for a guarantee of money and salvation in return for killing a writer. Like, I assume, the man who attacked him.

Satanic Verses is, in my view, hands down one of the great novels of the 20th century, right up there with Joseph Hellers Catch-22, Mr. Rushdies own earlier novel Midnights Children, and Nikos Kazantzakiss Last Temptation of Christ (a novel which earned that Greek author his share of death treats by crazed fanatic Christians for its depiction of Christ as a man driven by voices telling he is a messiah to make and sell execution crosses to the Romans to prevent any possibility of that happening to him).

Funny and deep at the same time, Mr. Rushdie in Satanic Verses presents a very humorous and by turns rather wacky Mohammad, living in his cave and writing his Koran.

It is the depiction of the Prophet as very human that was the ostensible reason for Mr. Khomeinis fatwah, but those who read the whole book would have realized as I did that the truly psychotic old imam character living in a London flat and mailing taped rants of hate and rebellion to his followers in Iran - a character clearly modeled on Mr. Khomeini himself - provided was the real reason for his fatwah.

That is, the fatwah condemning Mr. Rushdie to death was issued by Mr. Khomeini not to defend the honor of the Prophet, but as revenge for his own being made a subject of ridicule as a dotty charlatan and dangerous psychopath.

What made the old man with the stern visage and big white beard even angrier, I am sure, was Mr. Rushdies rapier-like wit, particularly in that novel. It is one thing to be insulted, but it is far worse to be ridiculed.

There were artists and writers, notably Roald Dahl and the singer Cat Stevens (a brilliant and sensitive musician who adopted Islam and for a time renounced singing), who either, like Dahl, blamed Rushdie for bringing the fatwah on himself, or like Stevens, said he deserved to die for blasphemy (a position he later said he disavowed and regretted).

At a time when here in the United States, books are being banned by benighted right-wing school boards, denounced in Congress by charlatan ignoramuses like Harvard (supposedly) educated Ted Cruz (R-TX), censored by state education departments, and in some cases burned, when right-wing and religio-fascists acting on their own steal or check out and never return books from libraries that they do not think other people ought to read, we should not be too surprised to have an assassination attempt here on a fiction writer.

The problem is that the ignorant and stupid who cannot debate their way out of a paper bag, instead turn to violence and killing when they cannot figure out how to verbally criticize someone they disagree with.

Hopefully the ignorant zealot who stabbed Salman Rushdie failed in his effort to silence a courageous and talented writer, and will spend some of his time in jail learning how to do literary criticism as an alternative to using a shiv to make a point.

My hope is for Mr. Rushdie to recover from this vicious attack and give us another great novel. Maybe next, when he is feeling up to it, he could take on the whack-job, AR-toting yahoos here in his adopted country who are parading around like brownshirts of yore calling for a new American Civil War. As a group they are perfect targets for his brutal wit.

Reprinted here with the permission of "This Can Not Be Happening" The only news organization in the United States to be labeled a threat by the Department of Homeland Security!!