The Timing Behind Attack on Salman Rushdie

By E. Michael Jones, Editor of Culture Wars Magazine

On Friday, August 12, a 24-year-old New Jersey resident by the name of Hadi Matar stormed the stage in western New York where the Anglo-Indian author Salman Rushdie was scheduled to speak and stabbed him 15 times before he was subdued by a security guard and members of the audience. The assault was immediately labeled “an assault on freedom of thought and speech” after Rushdie was praised as “an inspirational defender of persecuted writers and journalists across the world.”

Missing from this and other news accounts was the role Rushdie played as an agent provocateur in a campaign that was designed to provoke violent responses from the Islamic world, which would be then turned around to demonize them. No one would know who Salman Rushdie was if he hadn’t written The Satanic Verses as the inauguration of in an ongoing assault on Muslim culture which has continued to this day and has been revived by Matar’s assault for further weaponization.

The Satanic Verses paved the way for the Danish cartoon crisis which unfolded on September 30, 2005, after the Danish periodical Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons ridiculing the prophet Muhammad. Then as now, the assault on Islamic sensibilities was justified in the name of “freedom of thought and speech.” But in the light of subsequent events, it became clear that the point of these intentionally reckless and provocative acts was the Islamic reaction, which included protests around the world, “including violence and riots in some Muslim countries.”

In September 2012, the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, aping Jyllands-Posten, published a series of cartoons that were deliberately calculated to offend the sensibilities of Muslims, including a cartoon that “depicted Muhammad as a nude man on all fours with a star covering his anus.”[6] What followed was so predictable that one had to conclude that provoking violent reactions were part of the plan from the beginning. On January 7, 2015, two Muslim gunmen forced their way into the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo and opened fire, killing twelve staff members and wounding 11.

Jonas Alexis

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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