Last Friday, the award-winning British American novelist Salman Rushdie took the stage in Chautauqua, New York, ironically to give a talk praising the United States as a safe haven for exiled writers like himself. Instead, he was assaulted by a knife-wielding assailant.
The 75-year-old was gravely injured. While he appears to be recovering, Rushdie’s survival may be due to luck, since a doctor was attending his lecture and immediately treated his near-fatal wounds. In truth, this was the attack that Rushdie and his fans have nervously expected for over three decades, since revolutionary Iran put a contract out on his life. In 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie for “blasphemy,” and Tehran followed up with a $3 million bounty on the writer’s head. Rushdie lived in hiding and under 24-hour British police protection for years thereafter.
That fatwa was surely on the mind of Hadi Matar, Rushdie’s would-be assassin, who was arrested after stabbing his target. A 24-year-old from New Jersey, Matar was born in the U.S. to Lebanese Shiite parents. Based on his social media accounts, Matar appears to be a big fan of Shiite extremism and especially of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s powerful paramilitary enforcers.
Matar’s family comes from southern Lebanon, an area controlled by the Lebanese Hezbollah, whose armed wing is closely linked to the IRGC. His online postings reflect admiration for the IRGC, including for Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the longtime leader of the Quds Force, the IRGC’s secret operations wing, who was killed in January 2020 by a U.S. drone strike as the Iranian spymaster visited Baghdad. In an odd twist, Matar was carrying a fake driver’s license under the name of Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s shadowy arch-terrorist, and IRGC senior officer, who was killed in Damascus in 2008 in an apparent U.S.-Israeli joint intelligence operation.
This was no random act — Matar obtained an advanced pass to attend Rushdie’s talk — but it’s too early to determine if his attack was ordered by Tehran or merely inspired by it. The regime’s gloating, including praise for the attack by regime allies and the celebratory tone of hard-line Iranian media — the pro-mullah newspaper Khorasan ran an image of Rushdie on a stretcher with the headline: “Satan on the path to hell” — indicates that Tehran approves of Matar’s deed.
Whether the IRGC ordered the hit is another question, but it hardly seems improbable given recent news.
Last week, the Department of Justice announced attempted murder charges filed against Shahram Poursafi, an Iranian national and Quds Force member, who offered $300,000 for the assassination of John Bolton, the longtime opponent of revolutionary Iran who served as former President Donald Trump’s national security adviser — this plot was reported by the Washington Examiner in March. Moreover, Poursafi offered $1 million for the assassination of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. These efforts at wetwork, as assassinations are called in the spy trade, were viewed by the IRGC as payback for Soleimani.
Such operations inside the U.S. are risky for the IRGC, given Iran’s limited diplomatic presence here, but this hasn’t stopped the Quds Force from trying.
In late July, police arrested a man brandishing an AK-47 outside the Brooklyn home of Masih Alinejad, an Iranian American journalist and activist employed by the Voice of America’s Persian Service. Alinejad is hated by the mullahs for her opposition to the regime, so Iranian intelligence keeps trying to eliminate her. Last year, the U.S. indicted four Iranian spies for attempting to kidnap Alinejad and abscond with her to Venezuela in a speedboat, an outlandish plot that was thankfully thwarted by the FBI. In 2019, the FBI likewise saved Roya Hakakian, an Iranian American poet living in Connecticut also targeted for death by Tehran.
Iran’s mullah regime has been attempting wetwork in the U.S. since its birth, back to the July 1980 gunning down of the former Iranian diplomat Ali Tabatabai at the door of his Bethesda, Maryland, home by an assassin working for Tehran. The response of U.S. authorities to these brazen attacks has generally been modest. Even mass-murdering Iranian plots are routinely ignored by Washington.
In 2011, Tehran got caught red-handed planning to murder the Saudi ambassador to Washington by bombing Georgetown’s fashionable Cafe Milano, an outrageous plot that, if not thwarted, would have caused dozens of U.S. casualties. The Obama administration’s pushback over this plot barely registered, an act of cowardice that only encouraged more Iranian bad behavior, as Washington insiders were well aware. Desperate to secure the Iran nuclear deal, the White House looked the other way and fired top U.S. officials such as Jim Mattis, who dared to complain privately.
Today, the Biden administration, which is heavily staffed by Obama-era retreads, wants the Iran deal back, after Trump killed it. Even though the mullahs show no signs of honest parley, President Joe Biden seems willing to look the other way about Tehran’s bad behavior, just as former President Barack Obama did. The White House has issued two press releases about the attack on Rushdie. Neither makes any mention of Iran or the fatwa ordering Rushdie’s killing. This is unacceptable and will only encourage more murderous misconduct by the mullahs in Tehran.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
