J. K. Rowling was threatened with death after her post in defense of the stabbed writer
Famous British author Salman Rushdie is no longer on a breathing machine and can speak, his agent Andrew Wylie has confirmed. Writer Aatish Taseer tweeted that “the machine is off and he’s talking (and joking).”
US President Joe Biden condemned the “merciless attack,” and an Iranian lawmaker declared: “If the attacker is a Muslim who has never seen Rushdie and has no relation to Iran, then the Islamic revolution has been exported to the very heart of the enemy.”
Rushdie was attacked in Chautauqua, in western New York state. He was attacked with a knife by 24-year-old Shia Hadi Matar – 24-year-old Shia during a lecture the writer gave at the Shattoqua Institute. The attacker is being held without bail after prosecutor Jason Schmitt said Matar had obtained an advance pass to the event and positioned himself to attack and injure the writer. Matar struck 12 times with a knife – 3 times in the neck, 4 times in the stomach, and one of Rushdie’s eyes was injured during the blows to the head.
After receiving first aid at the scene, Rushdie, 75, was airlifted to hospital and put on a ventilator, with severed nerves in one arm and liver damage and an injured eye.
“The news is not good,” his agent, Andrew Wiley, said in a written statement.
Witnesses saw alleged knife attacker Hadi Matar of New Jersey deliver 10-15 blows in a matter of seconds before Rushdie fell to the floor covered in blood. The attacker, dressed in black and wearing a black mask, stormed the stage in Chautauqua as the writer was being introduced at a cultural festival before giving a speech about free artistic expression.
On February 14, 1989, the late Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie to be killed for his novel The Satanic Verses. The book provoked fierce protests in the Muslim world because it was considered blasphemous and disrespectful to the Prophet Muhammad. The Iranian government has offered a bounty of nearly $3 million on his head. The first assassination attempt against the writer was the same year. In the late 1990s, the Iranian government distanced itself from the fatwa, but various religious foundations continued to offer a reward for his murder. They even raised the table from 2.8 to 3.3 million dollars.
Over the years, the fatwa has brought the death of a number of other Satanic Verses related book professionals. The novel’s Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi died after a knife attack in July 1991, and Italian translator Ettore Capriolo was seriously injured in Milan. In October 1993, Norwegian book publisher William Nygaard was shot three times outside his home in Oslo, The New York Times recalls.
Salman Rushdie won the Booker Prize in 1981 for his book Midnight’s Children. He is also known for his works “Shame”, “The Moor’s Last Breath”, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, “Rage”, “Shalimar the Clown”, “The Enchantress of Florence”. His style combines mythology and fantasy with realistic events and is often defined as magical realism mixed with historical fiction. The theme of the meeting of the East and the West also stands out in his works.
Rushdie is a champion of free speech, having been particularly vocal in his defense of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo after its journalists were gunned down by Islamists in Paris in 2015.
The Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov also reacted to the attack, who told how ten years ago he met the great writer at the Brooklyn festival. “You can kill a man with a knife, but not a writer, not a magician,” he wrote on Facebook.
The Bulgarian PEN Tsneter also strongly condemned the attack on Salman Rushdie.
British writer J. K. Rowling was threatened with death after her post in defense of the stabbed writer, reported BGNES.
The 57-year-old author of the Harry Potter novels posted on her profile screenshots of a message from a user who wrote “don’t worry, you’re next” in response to her post, in which she wrote that she felt very bad after the news about the attack on Rushdie.
The screenshots of the threat are accompanied by a tag of the Twitter support account and the words “Any chance of help?”
She later updated her followers on the situation, commenting: “To everyone sending their support: thank you. The police are already working on the case.”
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