Pity poor Hadi Matar. The "New Jersey man" rushed the stage at Western New York's Chautauqua Institution last August hoping, one suspects, to be remembered as the John Wilkes Booth of radical Islam.
Matar's target was Salman Rushdie, the celebrated British-American author whose many books included one that displeased the world's more sensitive Muslims.
Indeed, Rushdie's 1988 book, "Satanic Verses," prompted riots throughout the Muslim world, attacks (at least one lethal) on Rushdie's collaborators and a fatwa from Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Rushdie had survived at least a few assassination attempts before the knife-wielding Matar caught up with him on the Chautauqua stage. Admittedly hoping to kill Rushdie, Matar succeeded in costing Rushdie an eye and the use of one hand.
The attack took place on Aug. 12, 2022. The New York Times has not mentioned Matar's name since Sept. 7, and then only to comment on a routine delay in the processing of his case at the Chautauqua County courthouse.
The county prosecutor noted that "the police" – meaning the local police – were attempting to determine whether Matar acted alone, but the Times expressed no interest in learning anything more.
Neither did the president. The day after the attack, Biden released an anodyne statement about how "the ability to share ideas without fear" is a building block "of any free and open society," but he offered no call to action, no resolve to seek justice, no scolding of Iran or radical Islam, no dispatching of the FBI.
The staged attack on Jussie Smollett prompted considerably more presidential outrage. "What happened today to @JussieSmollett must never be tolerated in this country," thundered Uncle Joe. "We are with you, Jussie."
Rushdie is a United States citizen. On the day of the attack, he was scheduled to give a talk on how the United States had become a refuge for politically endangered writers.
But Rushdie misread his adopted homeland. Had he written in defense of sexually mutilating children and been stabbed by a crazed Christian, the New York Times would have made a household name out of his attacker.
Chelsea Clinton would surely have demanded justice. "Over 50% of the attempted book bans last year involved books with LGBTQ+ characters & themes," she whined on Twitter this week. "Bans such as these are nothing but harmful."
But an ongoing fatwa by a nation state that results in the near assassination of a famed author is all but ignored. For the Iran-appeasers in the media-Democratic complex the attack was pure embarrassment.
The fatwa remains in place. The bounty now exceeds $3 million. In February of this year, Mohammad Esmail Zarai, the Iranian cleric responsible for enforcing the fatwa, praised Matar and announced he would be given property in Iran as a reward.
According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, "Zarai reiterated the organization's commitment to implementing the fatwa and promised that every effort would be made to do so, and added that whoever killed Rushdie would also be given land in Iran."
Although Iran has officially denied any connection to Matar's attack on Rushdie, it has also said that Rushdie himself is to blame for what Matar did to him.
These are the same people, by the way, to whom the Obama administration sent pallets of cash in 2016 as part of the president's vaunted deal with Iran.
Poor Matar. The American-born son of Lebanese immigrants misread his parents' new homeland as badly as did Rushdie. Fame has eluded Matar. Not one American out of a thousand could recognize his name.
If he had collaborators, Washington doesn't want to know. The Department of Justice has no interest in the case. Nor does the FBI or the CIA and certainly not the New York Times.
His story is told only in the various gazettes and journals of western New York. Reading those, we learn that the overwhelmed local prosecutors and public defenders will likely see to it that his trial is postponed until the fall.
Until then Matar rots away in a county jail in Mayville, New York, a town no bigger, nor more cosmopolitan, than the fictional Mayberry.
Hoping to achieve the notoriety of a John Wilkes Booth or a Lee Harvey Oswald, Hadi Matar has achieved parity with Mayberry's town drunk, Otis Campbell. One only wonders whether the jailers allow Matar to check himself in and out of his cell Otis-style.
Jack Cashill's forthcoming book, "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities," is available for pre-order in all formats.
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