I just stood there like a pinata during my stab attack, Rushdie reveals in new book
SALMAN Rushdie says he felt ‘ like a pinata’ in the frenzied stabbing attack that left him blind in one eye.
In his new book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, published today, he describes how he was ‘transfixed’ and did not try to run.
Sir Salman, 76, writes that he has no memory of seeing a blade as the attacker approached him at a US literary event in 2022.
He said of the 27-second attack, in which he was stabbed multiple
‘Transfixed and unable to run’
times: ‘I just stood there like a pinata and let him smash me.’
A pinata is a decorated animal figure that children break open to get at party treats.
The author explains the closest he has got to understanding his inaction in response to the assault is that ‘the targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real’. He writes how he saw ‘in the corner of my right eye – the last thing my right eye would ever see’ a man in black running at him.
He had imagined an assassin coming for him since 1989 when Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini declared his novel The Satanic Verses ‘blasphemous’ and issued a fatwa. This meant that Sir Salman’s first thought on being attacked was ‘So it’s you’, followed by ‘Why now?’
He was set upon on stage as he prepared to give a lecture at New York’s Chautauqua Institution about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.
His alleged attacker Hadi Matar, 24, a Shia Muslim American from New Jersey, has pleaded not guilty to charges of second- degree attempted murder and assault.
In his new book, Sir Salman does not refer to Matar by name, and calls him only ‘the A’.
He writes: ‘ My Assailant, my would-be Assassin, the Asinine man who made Assumptions about me, and with whom I had a near lethal Assignation. What I call him in the privacy of my home is my business.’
The author of Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981, writes that ‘the most obsessing’ thing about the New York attack is that he will now always be the author who got knifed.
Yesterday he told the BBC that he remembers his eye was left hanging down his face ‘like a softboiled egg ‘and that losing it ‘upsets him every day’.
‘I remember thinking I was dying,’ he said. ‘Fortunately, I was wrong.’
He also revealed how he had a nightmare about being attacked two days before the event.
AS bare-faced lies go, the Iranian foreign ministry statement following its deadly attack on Israel takes some beating. ‘Iran does not seek to escalate tensions in the region,’ a spokesman said.
Escalating tensions, along with persecuting women and political opponents, has been Tehran’s stock in trade since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Just ask Salman Rushdie, who tells in today’s Mail of the moment a crazed knifeman tried to kill him.
His assailant was inspired by the fatwa pronounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini on Mr Rushdie over his allegedly blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses.
Iran is a tyrannical, power- hungry theocracy which would love to wipe the Jewish state from the map. When judging Israeli policy, we should never forget it is fighting for its very existence.