Rushdie Aside, a Fatwa is Not Necessary to Attack and Kill the ‘Enemies of Islam’

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Hadi Matar is a Lebanese Shi’a, linked to Hezbollah, who managed to be admitted to the United States — how he entered the country needs to be investigated — and was living in New Jersey when he tried to carry out the fatwa issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie, for the crime of blaspheming Islam in his book The Satanic Verses. According to the fatwa, Khomeini ordered Muslims everywhere to kill Rushdie. For a decade, Rushdie was in hiding but finally began to appear in public, albeit with security guards. Now the man who tried to kill Rushdie, stabbing him in the head, neck, torso, and left hand, and leaving the writer blind in one eye and without the use of his left hand, has just been found guilty of attempted murder. Kathreen Masih wrote about this for Jihad Watch here, and more on this loyal defender of the faith and would-be murderer can be found here: “Man Who Stabbed Novelist Salman Rushdie Guilty of Attempted Murder,” Algemeiner, February 22, 2025:

Hadi Matar, the man who stabbed and partially blinded the novelist Salman Rushdie onstage at a New York arts institute, was found guilty on Friday of attempted murder.

Matar, 27, can be seen in videos of the 2022 attack rushing the Chautauqua Institution’s stage as Rushdie was being introduced to the audience for a talk about keeping writers safe from harm, some of which were shown to the jury during the seven days of testimony.

Rushdie, 77, was stabbed with a knife multiple times in the head, neck, torso and left hand, blinding his right eye and damaging his liver and intestines, requiring emergency surgery and months of recovery….

Matar faces a sentence of 25 years in prison from this conviction, but let’s not forget that he still faces another trial in a federal court for terrorism, and for providing material support to the terrorist group Hezbollah. Add at least another 25 years for those charges, and Matar will likely die in prison, as he deserves.

A Muslim fanatic, an admirer of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, outraged at what he described as Rushdie’s “attack on Islam,” savagely attacked Salman Rushdie in an attempt to murder him. He blinded him in one eye, and severely damaged his left hand, but failed to kill the writer. Matar will now be able for decades to conduct his prison dawah. Why not, to prevent that outcome, instead place him in solitary confinement for the next 50 or 60 years?

Matar was not the only Muslim who wanted to kill Rushdie — there have been several attempts on his life. Nor was Rushdie their only target. Anyone involved in the publication of the book, including its translations, also deserved to die. In 1991, the Italian translator of the book was stabbed, but survived. In the same year, the book’s Japanese translator, Hitohi Igarashi, was also stabbed to death. In 1993, the publisher of the Norwegian version of The Satanic Verses, William Nygard, was shot three times, but managed to survive. Rushdie, after he went into hiding, was told that members of the Lebanese Shi’a group Hezbollah, were trying to locate and to murder him.

Of course, a fatwa is not necessary to attack and kill the “enemies of Islam.” The man who decapitated the French teacher Samuel Paty in 2020 needed no fatwa to proceed. In a class on freedom of expression, Paty had shown his pupils several of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Muhammad, including one where his genitals are exposed. Paty exempted Muslim students from having to attend that particular class. A Muslim student who was not even at the school at the time nonetheless complained to her family about Paty’s use of those cartoons. The story spread on social media, and a Chechen “refugee,” the 18-year-old Abdoullakh Abouyezidovich Anzorov, arrived to see justice done — that is, he decapitated Paty with a cleaver.

Other murders of teachers in France have not been directly linked to acts of “blasphemy,” but reflect, rather, the desire of some Muslims to harm Infidels as a way to show solidarity with other Muslims in distant conflicts. Such Muslim solidarity explains the October 13, 2023 attack by another Chechen, Mohamed Mogouchkov, on people at a school in Arras, in which the teacher, 57-year-old Dominique Bernard, was stabbed to death. This happened not even a week after the Hamas atrocities in Israel took place, in which the terror group’s operatives had raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered 1,200 Israelis, and when, on October 8, the IDF began its attack on Hamas. Mogouchkov clearly wanted to demonstrate his solidarity with Hamas, and what better way to so that than by murdering a few Infidels?