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Salman Rushdie stabbed — 20 Comments

  1. Airlifted to a hospital. There’s a picture of people at the scene holding his feet up, perhaps to increase blood flow to his upper body? I hope he survives.

  2. The likelihood that the attack was made by a Muslim, inspired by Islam, is very high; it is also likely that his identity will be concealed by the authorities for as long as possible, then buried by the mendacious and malicious MSM. Several days ago, the senile buffoon illegitimately installed at 1600 (or his handlers) put out a statement about the killing of four Muslims in NM strongly implying that it resulted from bigotry or hatred (“Islamophobia”, “white supremacy”, “Ultra-MAGA”, etc); when the Muslim culprit (a Sunni, supposedly angry over his daughter’s marriage to a Shia), was apprehended, the story quickly vanished into the Orwellian “memory-hole.”

  3. It’s the Chautauqua Institution, whose summer programs attract a genteel clientele. Chautauqua County itself is a place undone by sectoral shifts against manufacturing in this country, and rather scruffy. That having been said, the smart money says there have been about 30 homicides in the county in the last 20 years and that 90% of them were the issue of domestic disputes in local trailer parks and bar fights in Jamestown and Dunkirk. They did not have much security at the institution because they’ve never needed much of it.

  4. Art Deco:

    Are you kidding me? Anywhere Rushdie speaks publicly needs good security. That’s elementary. The Chautauqua Institution may not need it for other people, but they are fools if they didn’t realize they needed it for him.

  5. The fanatic could have used a ceramic knife, which wouldn’t show up on any metal detector. That’s if there even was any attempt to screen attendees. I suspect complacency may have been a factor. Enough time passes and caution lessens.

    8.11.2022 “Stabbings on rise in NYC during surge in major crime” https://nypost.com/2022/08/11/stabbings-on-rise-in-nyc-amid-surge-in-major-crime/

    Knife attacks have been on the rise in NYC since 2008.

    “2008, even as gun killings fell, the number of killings committed with knives or other “cutting instruments” rose 50 percent in New York City, the Police Department said: to 125 from 83.”

    “Through Sunday, the NYPD had recorded 567 slashing attacks, some 20 percent above the pace set in early 2015.”

  6. Mohammad set the example for devout Muslims when he signed a peace treaty with a Jewish tribe and then broke it ten years later when he decided his followers were strong enough to now beat that tribe. After the Jewish tribe surrendered, he ordered the slaughter of the 600 Jewish males.

    George Bush, Cheney, Trump, even Obama, they’re all marked men. Biden has now allowed how many jihadists free entry?

  7. “Knife attacks have been on the rise …”

    I carry a fairly hefty pocket knife these days. I’m old, retired and not much of a brawler. I only want to have that heft in my pocket to remind me … even subconsciously … that I (and all of us) need to be alert. On my game. Ready for unexpected events.
    I don’t expect to have to defend myself in a knife fight but I do want to be aware and I do want to have *something*.

  8. Could have been a ceramic knife, but these days, I’d imagine a 3-d printed knife would be quite easy to get through most security checks

  9. Are you kidding me?

    No, I’m not. The institution is an unincorporated village in the Town of Chautauqua. There are towns like Chautauqua in New York that have had one homicide in 200 years.

  10. Art Deco:

    This isn’t about the town.

    This is about anywhere Rushdie goes where it is known he will be. This was a scheduled address.

  11. JimNorCal,

    I also carry a fairly hefty pocket knife these days. As I too am getting old, as well as retired and am no longer the martial artist I once was, though anyone can foot strike to the knee, punch to the solar plexus and throat and gouge the eyes.

    I recommend acquiring a “Fast Strike Self Defense Tool” https://www.faststrikedefense.com/
    It fits nicely in my back pocket.

    As avoiding a fight in the first place is the best preventative, I do my shopping in the morning, when thugs are sleeping it off. Being unprepared is not an option.

  12. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center now has a satellite campus in Erie, Pa. They medivac’ed him there. Much closer than the level I hospitals in Buffalo. About 1/2 the distance.

  13. He starred in a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode making light of the fatwa. he episode painted the fatwa as an advantage to scoring with women.

    He was out and about with less concern and more safe than a Trump supporter with MAGA hat leaving a Trump rally.

  14. Probably a Muslim. That being said, there are crazies and a-holes in every category, black, white, yellow, brown, old, young, men, women, dogs, cats, etc.

    When there is news of drive by, or party, or club shooting, generally brown or black. School shooting, generally young and white.

  15. Muslims carry a grudge a long time. For 700 years, since the beginning of Islam, they prayed for the conquest of Rome. They finally achieved it in 1453 with the the capture of Constantinople. Osama bin Laden was a champ at this. He whined about the loss of al Andalus, Spain, to Ferdinand and Isabela in 1492. He chose September 11 to commemorate the destruction of the Caliph’s army at the Gates of Vienna by the Jan Sobieski, King of Poland, on that day in 1683.

  16. Update on Rushdie’s condition as of 5:29 DST: “The 75-year-old author was stabbed at least once in the neck and once in the abdomen and is still in surgery, officials said during a Friday evening press conference.

    Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, was identified as the suspect in the stabbing, Major Eugene J. Staniszewski of the New York State Police told reporters. He had a pass to access the grounds, just like the others who were in the audience, officials said. . . . Officials said a doctor who was in the audience helped care for Rushdie while they waited for EMTs to arrive. . . . Staniszewski said that the suspect also attacked another speaker, who suffered a minor face injury. He was taken to a hospital and has been released, Staniszewski said.”

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/salman-rushdie-attacked-stage-new-york/

    Hadi Matar doesn’t exactly sound like a WASP name. Can anyone identify the other speaker who was attacked?

  17. You can’t make this stuff up.
    https://accordingtohoyt.com/2022/08/12/authenticity/#comment-868231

    Apparently Democrats issued a bunch of statements denouncing Trump for Salmon Rushdie getting stabbed today, claiming that the violence was due to Trump and Republicans “encouraging violence”. So of course the attacker was a supporter of Iran which still has an open Fatwa for Rushdie’s murder and has promised to reward whoever kills him:

    No link, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

    However, Greg Lukianoff & Robert Shibley had this to say.
    https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/salman-rushdie-stabbing-shows-danger-221230063.html

    The message sent by a successful attack on Rushdie is loud and unmistakable: your hurtful speech is the equivalent of violence against me and my values, and you deserve violence in return. It’s a message intended not just for Rushdie, but for anyone who might be tempted to follow in his footsteps.

    When we began our careers in free speech advocacy in the early 2000s, the conflation of the expression of opinion with physical violence was a fringe belief, at least in the United States. Yet over the last 10 years, we have seen that argument become far more common, first on college campuses, and then in our society at large.

    Advocates for seeing offensive speech as a form of violence tend to think that doing so would make society better. For example, just days after the riot that shut down a Milo Yiannopolous speech at the University of California-Berkeley in 2017, the Daily Californian student newspaper ran five op-eds in a single day from authors who sought to justify the use of violence in order to prevent the political provocateur of the moment from speaking. “These were not acts of violence. They were acts of self defense,” concluded one of the pieces.

    These are not simply fringe opinions out of Planet Berkeley. In the largest campus survey of free expression, only 76 percent of students said it’s never acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech. That is almost one in four students reporting some level of acceptance for violence to stop a speech they disagree with—even if they think it’s only “rarely” acceptable. This is alarming given that such efforts would be legal zero percent of the time.

    It is a great sign of comparative peace and progress that younger Americans can convince themselves of a rough moral equivalence between peaceful argument and violence as a means for resolving disputes. But if violence and hurtful speech are actually equivalent, it’s not only logical to answer speech with violence, it’s impossible to cogently argue that you shouldn’t. A downward spiral towards violence is guaranteed.

    But we have no doubt that if our society reverted to solving more disputes using violence, they would quickly understand the superiority of liberal institutions like courts and Congress, and liberal norms like freedom of speech, over “might makes right.”

    The vast majority of Americans who say that violent responses to speech are sometimes acceptable will nevertheless be appalled by the attack on Rushdie. Yet they must come to grips with the fact that today’s attack, multiplied thousands of times, is how a society where violence is acceptable protest to speech would actually look. Free speech, and the peaceful version of conflict resolution it enables, is the only solution to this problem that does not require authoritarian repression.

    Quoting an unnamed writer, Sigmund Freud perceptively noted in 1893 that “the man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilization.” This is the painful lesson of thousands of years of human endeavor. It’s also a lesson our high schools, colleges, and institutions of all kinds have not lately bothered to teach. We may live to regret that oversight.

    But beyond the hard-won lessons behind the speech/violence distinction, our thoughts are with Salman Rushdie and his family tonight. For his sake, and for all of ours, we hope that this brave artist will not only survive but live on to teach the world to never take a free and open society for granted.

    Robert Shibley is Executive Director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Greg Lukianoff is FIRE’s President and CEO.

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