Writer Salman Rushdie attacked at an event in New York

Euskaraz irakurri: Salman Rushdie idazlea sastatu dute ekitaldi batean, New York

The author Salman Rushdie75, was attacked with a knife on stage this Friday while participating in a performing in Chautauqua, a city in western New York state, local media report. He was taken to hospital by helicopter.

The British Indian writer, who was threatened with death for decades for his writings, has been stabbed. His attacker, a man, was immediately arrested by a police officer assigned to his security.

The former Booker Prize winner was speaking at the event when a person wearing a black mask approached him and managed to knock him down.

Carl LeVan, a writer who claimed to have witnessed the attack on Twitter, said Rushdie was “stabbed several times before the attacker was subdued by security”.

Just witnessed the horrific assassination attempt on #SalmanRushdie‘s life. He was stabbed several times before the attacker was subdued by security. Some intrepid members of the audience took to the stage. What courage is still expected of us to defend even the smallest liberties?

— Carl LeVan (@Dev4Security) August 12, 2022

In their initial information about what happened, the New York State Police indicated that the writer suffered “an apparent stab wound.” in the neck“.

Rushdie intervened in a debate over the cities that offer asylum to persecuted writers, as can be seen in the organization’s program City of Asylum.

Rushdie’s conference — which the organization says isn’t the first he’s held there — was titled “More Than Shelter” and was supposed to be about the character of the United States “as a land of asylum and home to freedom of creative expression.”

Rushdie, of Indian descent (born in Bombay), currently holds dual British and American citizenships and has lived in the United States since 2000.

The writer has always criticized the governments of the countries in which he has lived and religious extremism in his writings.

“I never thought of myself as a writer dealing with religion until a religion started persecuting me,” he says in his article The Problem of Religion, adding that the problem lies not only in Islamic fundamentalism but also in fanaticism. , embodied in the figure of Tony Blair and in the US government George W. Bush.

the publication of the Devil’s versesin 1988, caused an immediate controversy in the Muslim world over the alleged irreverence with which the figure of the Prophet Muhammad is treated.

India banned the book on October 5 and South Africa on Nov 24. After several weeks, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Bangladesh, Sudan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Qatar they had also banned the novel.

Iran He considers it blasphemous and the then Supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a decree in 1989 calling for the writer’s death. The Iranian government eventually distanced itself from Khomeini’s “fatwa,” but in 2012, a semi-official Iranian religious foundation increased Rushdie’s pay from $2.8 million to $3.3 million.

Rushdie is alive because a police officer rescued him, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has said. Two hours after the attack, the governor appeared before the media to confirm that “he is still alive” and that he is “being cared for according to his needs”.

“It was a state police officer who stood up and saved his life, protecting him and the moderator (of the conference),” Hochul said.

“The attack on Salman Rushdie in New York is cowardly. This is the result of hate campaigns systematically carried out by fanatics and radicalization of ordinary people,” he wrote on Twitter. Tushar Gandhigreat-grandson of Indian peace leader Mahatma Gandhi.