A few strong supporters on Saturday, Iranian newspapers lauded the individual who assaulted and severely injured author Salman Rushdie, whose work “The Satanic Verses” had garnered death threats from Iran since 1989.
There has been no official comment in Iran to the attack on Rushdie, who was stabbed in the neck and body onstage at a conference in New York state on Friday.
The conservative Kayhan daily, whose editor-in-chief is handpicked by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, on the other hand, wrote,“A thousand bravos … to the brave and dutiful person who attacked the apostate and evil Salman Rushdie in New York,” adding, “The hand of the man who tore the neck of God’s enemy must be kissed”.
The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, in 1989, calling on Muslims throughout the world to kill the
Indian-born author after his work was branded as blasphemous, driving him into years of hiding. Twitter suspended Khamenei’s account in 2019 when he tweeted that Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie was “solid and irrevocable.”
On Saturday, the Asr Iran news site quoted Khamenei as saying that the “arrow” launched by Khomeini “will one day hit the target.”
In 1997, the 15th Khordad Foundation, a rich Iranian religious organisation, raised the bounty on Rushdie’s head to $2.5 million, eight years after it originally offered one. In 2012, the foundation boosted the sum to $3.3 million.
The foundation, one of several groups overseen by Khamenei’s administration, has not publicly responded to the attack on Rushdie and did not reply quickly to a Reuters emailed request for comment on Saturday.
“Knife in Salman Rushdie’s neck,” read the headline of the conservative Vatan Emrooz daily. The headline in the Khorasan daily read, “Satan on the way to hell.”
According to law enforcement officials quoted by NBC New York on Saturday, the suspect in the incident, Hadi Matar, was sympathetic to Shi’ite Muslim radicalism and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Rushdie was on a ventilator and unable to talk on Friday evening following the event, which was criticised by authors and politicians worldwide as an assault on free expression.
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