The obscurantism knife has once again attacked freedom. More than thirty years after the intolerable appeal to the murder of Salman Rushdie uttered by the cantor of an Iranian Islamic revolution then in loss of speed, Ruhollah Khomeyni, he found himself a hand to try to execute this unworthy order, the August 12, in a small town in New York State.
The attempted assassination of the writer, who has become to his body defending a symbol of freedom of expression, was perpetrated in a cultural center, on the occasion of a conference, in the manifest absence of Special security measures. Cruel Irony, Salman Rushdie was to talk about the United States, where he has lived for two decades and where he was naturalized in 2016, as a refuge of writers in exile. Seriously injured, he was evacuated by helicopter and placed since under respiratory assistance. The animator of the planned debate was also injured, but more slightly.
The county police gave no indication concerning the motivations of the alleged aggressor, a resident of New Jersey, in the hours following the drama. She just gave her name, Hadi Matar, and her age, 24 years old. Everything suggests, however, that his motivations are linked to the accusations of blasphemy made for decades by cynical calculation, as by grim ignorance, against the author of the Satanic verses, published in 1988. They transformed into hell the life of their author, which has been working since that date with a target in the back.
Under the guise of the defense of an Islam presented very improper as attacked, the attacks on Salman Rushdie, which preceded the publication of the Fatwa of Khomeyni, were conducive to all manipulations. On the part of the first guide of the Iranian revolution first, Shiite, wanting to land as a protector of Islam more intransigent than Saudi Arabia Honnie, after the initial mobilization of foundations funded by Gulf countries, Sunnis, Against a work they probably did not read.
Manipulations on the part of the Iranian factions then, which used the Fatwa of 1989 to calibrate their rivalries. Also on the part of governments, starting with that of the homeland of the writer, India, by electoral calculation. But also many others, who have maintained claims around this quarrel mounted from scratch to better divert attention from otherwise more imperative internal problems with which they were responsible.
Long before the assault which has just been victim Salman Rushdie, this climate thus forged in total impunity killed. The circle of intolerance has widened, to the grotesque, to the translators of the work, murdered or attacked. The infernal machine having, for its instigators, demonstrates its effectiveness, this weapon of blasphemy was duplicated, with the same cynicism using the same ignorance, by the most radical Islamist currents against the background of the political Islam , as by jihadist groups.
This perversion of faith has extended as a metastasis. In France, the attack on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, in 2015, such as the atrocious assassination of teacher Samuel Paty, in 2020, are part of this wake as dead as insistent. The unbearable attack on which Salman Rushdie was the victim offers no choice than the intractable defense of the freedom to think and write. It should not suffer any accommodation.