In a knife attack in the French city of Mulhouse in late February, one person was dead and several injured. The attacker was an Algerian. Or rather a Muslim immigrant from Algeria. Who is still surprised hearing about an Islamic terrorist attack in Europe? The mainstream media, however, tries to downplay it as much as possible. This also applies to the trial against Hadi Matar (24), who attacked Salman Rushdie on a stage in 2022 in the US. Matar was found guilty of attempted murder last week.

By Arthur Blok and Paul Cliteur
The Lebanese-born American stormed the stage of the Chautauqua Institution where Rushdie was about to speak on 12 August 2022 and stabbed him fifteen times in front of a live audience. Due to the attack, the 77-year-old prize-winning novelist Blind was blinded in one eye and disabled in one arm. Another man was injured.

With this attack, Matar almost managed to carry out the Fatwa (a religious decree), pronounced in 1989, by the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini to kill Rushdie. The Fatwa was pronounced at the time for Rushdie's Islam criticism in his book The Satanic Verses (1988).

Shortly after the attack, the world reacted disappointed. What? More than thirty years after the Fatwa, it had still been possible that a terrorist attacked Rushdie and almost killed him.

Fortunately, Rushdie survived the attack, which was some reason for joy. The momentum was used in the (mainstream) media to pay wide attention to the freedom of expression, which had triumphed over the attacker's jihadism. Rushdie supported this reading of the event and called the 27-year-old Matar a "clown." Is that correct? Was Matar just a clown? And did Rushdie win the day?

It is all a matter of perspective.

Lone wolf or ties to Hezbollah
During the process, much attention was paid to whether Matar operated as a "lone wolf" or whether he had contact with Iran or other groups in the Middle East, such as Hamas in Gaza or the Lebanese Hezbollah. Matar did not release much information about his motives during the process.

“Free Palestine. Free Palestine,” he said to some journalists. He also mumbled: "From the river to the sea, Palestine Will Be Free." But furthermore, Matar made notes and made a somewhat absent impression.

A Lebanese official suggested that “Hezbollah likely started his ties with Matar when he visited in South Lebanon.” Of course, there is no evidence that he acted on behalf of the fallen Lebanese resistance group. However, the public prosecutor assumed that Matar was indeed motivated to prepare his attack on Rushdie by a speech that Hassan Nasrallah, the slain leader of Hezbollah, had given in 2006.

Rushdie explained during the process that he, while he was lying in a "lake of blood", was afraid he would not survive. Rushdie also remembered that he was saved by bystanders who jumped on stage, he emphasised that "without them, he would not have been alive anymore."

The latter is perhaps the most bitter aspect of this attack. Rushdie was present at the festival without security. After the attack, he is again with security at the court. It is incredibly cynical, but Rushdie is "back at square one."

From 1989 to roughly 2000, when he emigrated to the United States of America, he lived in a security regime in England. To escape that regime, he emigrated to the United States. In that country, he could move around more and more freely without security details following him day and night.

But now Rushdie is back in the "British situation," so with this personal freedom suffocating security. Rushdie felt that having a security detail was no longer necessary and wanted to lead a more normal life. That more "normal life" is no longer there for Rushdie. Under these circumstances, was the joy that Rushdie survived the attack a bit premature?

Joe Biden’s reaction to the attack
In 2024 Rushdie published Knife, A report of the attack. In it, Rushdie quotes from then-President of the U.S. Joe Biden about the attack on his life:

“Jill and I were shocked and saddened to learn of the vicious attack on Salman Rushdie yesterday in New York. We, together with all Americans and people around the world, are praying for his health and recovery...

…with his insight into humanity, unmatched sense for the story, and refusal to be intimidated or silenced stands for essential, universal ideals. Truth. Courage Resilience. The ability to share ideas without fear. These are the building blocks of any free and open society.” (p. 54).

Biden does not mention Rushdie's security during the festival. Also, the American Commander in Chief (and primary person responsible for safety in the US) does not seem to have worried at all for the safety of the most endangered writer in the world. At least, not before the attack. But also after the attack, Biden does not come up with more than “praying for his (Rushdie’s) health and recovery”. And praising him for his literary skills.

Biden's reaction is typical of the complete helplessness of world leaders when it comes to jihadist violence that affects the Western world.

The knife attack on Rushdie is in a tradition the French terrorism expert Gilles Kepel wrote about in Terror in France: The Rise of Jihad in the West (2015). In that book, Kepel elaborates on the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, which began in 2005. Stamped by the author as a ‘pivotal year’. A year earlier, in 2004, Dutch cineast and author Theo van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a radical Islamist. A murder that was not an accident.

Ten years later, in 2015, almost the entire editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo was murdered because of the publication of cartoons for which the Danish cartoonists had been hiding their whole lives.

In 2020, Samuel Paty was beheaded because of the show of some Mohammed cartoons during his social studies lesson. In 2024, the Assyrian bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was attacked in Sydney with a knife during a mass.

There are countless examples of situations that show that jihadist theo-terroristic attacks on the freedom of speech are not under control in the Western world at all. Biden's naive comments about Rushdie, nor the downplaying of such attacks in the mainstream media, are testimonies of that. Unfortunately, these things were not discussed during the trial against Matar and merely proved that the attacks on the freedom of speech in the West are spiralling out of control.