Again, we still don’t know why he was singled out for this brutality. Rushdie has not been targeted by his own state, of course-after living in hiding for years in London, he has lived openly in New York for the past two decades. The Yiddish poets and writers whom the dictator ordered shot in the basement of the Lubyanka prison. Maybe the most jolting immediate reaction was from PEN America: “We can think of no comparable incident of a public violent attack on a literary writer on American soil.” And it’s true: What other societies have given us murdered authors? Stalin’s Soviet Union is the one that comes quickest to my mind. Read: In hindsight, the war on terror began with Salman Rushdie This alone pushes us into dangerous territory, because now it is something that has happened something once considered a worst-case scenario is now an actuality-one that could happen again. And regardless of why the violence took place, one message was unambiguous precisely because the target was a writer: Free expression is worthy of a death sentence. Rushdie was still in surgery as of this evening, The New York Times reported. Of course one immediately wonders whether this act of violence was carried out by someone who intended to fulfill the fatwa issued in 1989 after furious reaction to his novel Satanic Verses-a call never truly rescinded-or whether this person had some other twisted explanation for their actions. We still don’t know the attacker’s motive, just that eyewitnesses were startled by how fast it happened and grateful for how quickly the attacker was detained. That it was here that Rushdie was struck repeatedly with a knife is a terrible irony. He was about to speak to an audience at the Chautauqua Institution, a cottage community that was founded in the late 19th century as a place for religious learning, and that has since become an oasis of education and discussion every summer. All because he wrote a book.Īnd so it came as a shock, but maybe not as a surprise, that Rushdie was attacked this morning onstage, in Chautauqua, New York, of all places. Whatever other opinion one might have about Rushdie and his skills as a novelist or his public persona, this much is true: He has understood what it means to be targeted and hated- burned in effigy-forced to hide and, even in recent years, to continue to look over his shoulder. He is a writer who has lived with the fear of being killed for his words. Salman Rushdie has had a price on his head for 33 years.
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