Liberalism didn't protect Salman Rushdie

UnHerd

Center

Mixed Factuality

Liberalism didn't protect Salman Rushdie

Why did he do it? Hadi Matar, 24 — dim, lugubrious, incel-y — had by his own admission “read, like, two pages” of The Satanic Verses. Judging by his slacker patter, one wonders whether he fully understood them. Yet there he was, “a squat missile” — as Rushdie describes him in Knife, his new memoir — charging at the elderly novelist like a crazed villain in a crude slasher flick. It was the last thing Rushdie saw through his right eye before Matar