Indian-born British-American novelist Salman Rushdie warned on Sunday 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.
Rushdie’s latest book, Knife: Meditations on an Attempted Murder, released last month, deals with the August 12, 2022, attack at the Chautauqua Institution in New York when a 22-year-old jihadist rushed the stage to kill him.
The attacker, New Jersey resident Hadi Matar, stabbed Rushdie in the face, neck, arm and abdomen—14 stab wounds in total. Doctors initially didn’t believe he would survive.
Rushdie told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in a recent interview: “The worst thing was the knife in my [right] eye…, it went as deep as the optic nerve, which is why there’s no possibility of saving the vision.”
Rushdie has lived in constant danger of death from Muslim fanatics since then-Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against him and his publishers at Viking Penguin in 1989 for his book The Satanic Verses, which came out a year earlier.
Khomeini called the book a “blasphemy against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran.”
Translators and publishers of Rushdie’s work were subject to attacks; several were assassinated.
