The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last week ought to be a wake-up call for the Biden administration. Thankfully, the acclaimed novelist made it out of the attack alive and has reportedly stabilized after sustaining significant injuries. In its wake, the administration has hemmed and hawed, almost certainly to shield its talks with Tehran from the fallout over this incident. But the blame for this heinous assault falls squarely on the Iranian regime.
The Iranians have had a $3 million bounty on Rushdie’s head since 1989, when he published The Satanic Verses, a work that was inspired by the life of Mohammed and includes passages that some Muslims find offensive. For years afterward, Rushdie was forced to live in hiding and had a security detail assigned to him; his Japanese-language translator was murdered in Tokyo; his Italian translator was stabbed; and his Norwegian-language translator was shot.
Iran’s commitment to the fatwa has waxed and waned, with various leaders pledging not to proceed with the order, while others renewed their vows to act on it. But the fatwa was never lifted, and as recently as six years ago, the regime increased its financial award for anyone who carried it out.
Hadi Matar is the 24-year-old man who reportedly took up the regime on that offer last Friday, as Rushdie appeared onstage at a festival in Chautauqua, N.Y. While the exact degree and type of coordination between Matar and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps are not clear, Matar’s sympathies are. On social media, he has repeatedly posted images of such Iranian luminaries as the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor, Khamenei, in addition to that of General Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian terrorist mastermind killed by the U.S. in 2020. In addition, the attack appears to have been “guided” by the Iranian regime, a NATO counterterrorism official told Vice News, though that report inexplicably also claimed that “there’s no evidence Iran was involved in organizing the attack.” As we already know, Iran ordered the attack decades ago; moreover, it now appears directly responsible for its having been executed. (Iranian officials, incredibly, deny responsibility, though they and their propaganda outlets are gloating about it.)
Tellingly, Rushdie was attacked just days after federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment targeting a Tehran-based member of the Revolutionary Guards for hiring a hitman to kill John Bolton. The writer was also attacked just over a week after a man with a gun was arrested outside the house of Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad in Brooklyn. Numerous other U.S. officials and journalists remain at risk, incredibly, on U.S. soil. Thus far, the only official U.S. response has been to condemn such acts publicly and to threaten vague consequences. The nuclear talks remain on track. Tehran evidently does not believe that murdering Americans will lessen the odds of striking an agreement with Washington.
The long-stalled negotiations between Iran and the U.S. to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement are at a critical stage. While the administration claims that it won’t lift stringent terrorism sanctions targeting the Iranian Guards, it has continued to deal with the Iranians in Vienna and Doha, therefore suggesting that some further U.S. concessions may be in the offing.
In a statement on Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken offered up a cleverly wordsmithed answer on the Iranian element in the Rushdie stabbing: “Iranian state institutions have incited violence against Rushdie for generations, and state-affiliated media recently gloated about the attempt on his life. This is despicable.” It sounds like a strong condemnation yet minimizes the regime’s blame. But words are not the root problem. The U.S. should have a policy response that includes an abandonment of the negotiations and a series of covert actions to put the Iranian terrorists on the backfoot, whatever that might mean in practice. (The highly competent and recently very successful Mossad, in addition to the architects of Soleimani’s assassination, might know.)
But above all else, constructing a forceful response begins with a statement of fact. The culprit here is not an amorphous wave of illiberalism threatening free speech everywhere, and it is not, as some well-meaning observers have suggested, cancel culture. The only force to blame is an insidious blend of Islamist violence with Iranian nationalism that, crassly speaking, answers only to force.
Writing about the plot on Bolton’s life last week, we warned that the federal agents won’t be able to disrupt every Iranian assassination attempt on U.S. soil. That, unfortunately, was borne out within the week, and absent a serious U.S. response, it remains painfully true today.