Fairview, New Jersey resident Hadi Matar was convicted on Friday of attempted murder for stabbing author Salman Rushdie on a lecture stage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York in 2022.
Matar ran up to Rushdie on Aug. 12, 2022, and stabbed him more than a dozen times before a live audience. The attack left the 77-year-old novelist without his right eye and with damage to his liver and hands.
The event moderator, Henry Reese, was also wounded.
As Matar was led out of the Chautauqua County Court on Friday, he uttered, “Free Palestine,” according to the AP.
Matar could receive up to 25 years in prison; the judge set sentencing for April 23.
Rushdie spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation center following the attack, which he detailed in his 2024 memoir, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.”
The Indian-born British-American spent years in hiding after then-Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his murder in 1989, following the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous and requiring assassination.
In May 2024, Rushdie warned that a Palestinian state would be a Taliban state, speaking in an interview with Germany’s Bild newspaper.
“[I]f there were a Palestinian state now, it would be run by Hamas and we would have a Taliban-like state. A satellite state of Iran. Is this what the progressive movements of the Western left want to create?” Rushdie asked.
“There are not a lot of deep thoughts about this, but mainly an emotional reaction to the deaths in Gaza. That’s OK. But when it slides into antisemitism and sometimes even support for Hamas, then it becomes problematic,” he added.
A separate federal indictment unsealed in U.S. District Court in Buffalo last July charges that Matar, a Shi’ite Muslim with Lebanese roots, “knowingly did attempt to provide material support and resources … to a designated foreign terrorist organization, namely, Hizballah,” around September 2020.
A trial on the federal terrorism-related charges has not yet been scheduled.
