CW: Violence
Update 20:00 EST :
Hours after he was attacked and stabbed, author Salman Rushdie was on a ventilator, with a damaged liver, severed nerves in an arm, and an eye he was likely to lose, his agent said.
Extremely bad take. Every reply is an even worse take.
Writing a book in the '80s that’s just 550 pages of hate speech is totally the same thing as being visibly queer in public.
Who in their right mind considers The Satanic Verses as hate speech? lol.
Considering it’s banned for being hate speech in 11 countries, was widely protested for being hate speech, and resulted in a fatwa for that reason, a fair number of people consider it to be hate speech.
It’s not protested for being hate speech. It’s protested for being blasphemous. These things are not even remotely the same. You have to be pretty fucking fanatical to think that some historical fiction novel is worth the amount of death and disaster that the book has provoked.
Chautauqua, N.Y. (AP) – Salman Rushdie, the author whose writing led to death threats from Iran in the 1980s, was attacked Friday as he was about to give a lecture in western New York.
An Associated Press reporter witnessed a man storm the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and begin punching or stabbing Rushdie as he was being introduced. The author was taken or fell to the floor, and the man was restrained.
Rushdie’s book “The Satanic Verses” has been banned in Iran since 1988, as many Muslims consider it to be blasphemous. A year later, Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death.
A bounty of over $3 million has also been offered for anyone who kills Rushdie.
Iran’s government has long since distanced itself from Khomeini’s decree, but anti-Rushdie sentiment lingered. In 2012, a semi-official Iranian religious foundation raised the bounty for Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million.
Rushdie dismissed that threat at the time, saying there was “no evidence” of people being interested in the reward.
That year, Rushdie published a memoir, “Joseph Anton,” about the fatwa.
Bounties on dissidents are rising with inflation but wages in the US aren’t
