Assange and Rushdie: Attempted Murder

The attempted murder of Salman Rushdie is big news and all the pundits and other media pimps are rushing to defend free speech and attack Iran. The NYT, CNN, MSNBC, the BBC -- all the commercial media (yes, YOU too, BBC and CBC) are outraged.

By now, a lot of Americans and other Westerners probably believe that Rushdie was stabbed by an Iranian extremist, following the 33 year old Fatwa that most people including the Iranians had forgotten about, the Iranians also having removed the injunction to kill Rushdie for blasphemy.

But Hadi Matar was not from the Middle East – he was an American from New Jersey, who lived in his Lebanese mother's basement.

He was just doing the American thing. When you're depressed, kill someone.

At least, he didn't get an AR14 and shoot school children.

The media don't see another one of those depressed, lost, lonely people responding to what their culture teaches them to do under stress – get crazy.

“There is a bigger picture”, they say. “This attack on Rushdie is an attack on us all”.

No, it isn’t’ . The media connect the dots alright but the wrong dots.

This was a targeted attack. Only Matar, did what Americans usually do, and did not identify a target that really deserved it.

This killing was not, as the media seem to imply about “free speech” or the Iranian Fatwa or the Satanic Verses a novel which Matar, like most Americans probably had not read.

It is about alienation in a dishonest culture, which pretends to promote equal opportunity, human rights, democracy and freedom of religion and expression and the rule of law, when the opposite is true. When most Americans graduate from high school, they just retreat to the basement and play video games.

Matar however visited Lebanon, where Hezbollah, the single group in the country with consistent moral values, is under constant attack by the West, and of course next-door neighbor, Israel, which bombs and kills with immunity. There, American hypocrisy could not be more evident. “It’s alright to kill ‘bad guys’ in the middle east, says the US Ambassador, even if those murdered are children. The US is the world’s most antisemitic nation but the Semites it targets are not Jewish — they are Islamic.

Back in the US of Alienation, Matar became a stranger in what he now realized was a strange land. He hid in the darkness of the basement and the darkness took him.

He got mad. And he needed something to punch -- or rather stab. Rushdie was just a convenient target.

Rushdie will recover it seems. And when he does he will get even more support. even adulation, although no on will read Satanic Verses, a book which is ironically is about social and cultural alienation.

In the meantime, the American Fatwa against Julian Assange remains in place, as it has been for years, as part of that most fundamentalist of religions: Americanism.

Rushdie wrote a novel about his personal angst as Muslim—it’s fiction. Assange was the conscience of the world. He did not publish fiction – just truth, with 100% credibility. Assange was the conscience of the world. For that offense, he has been imprisoned for years, now in Belmarsh prison under conditions described by no less that the UN Rapporteur as torture. His health is declining. His rights have been abused. The CIA plotted assassination.

If he goes to the US he will surely die.

Rushdie was stabbed a couple of times. Assange has been stabbed and cut over he years. The Death of a Thousand Cuts.

But Assange is ignored by the Media; ignored by the American public, in whose name successive Democratic and Republican governments have acted. Where is the outrage? Where is the shame?.

Hadi Matar is mentally ill. The US of A is worse. Not just mentally ill but psychopathic. Matar can be excused to some degree. The US of A cannot.

Julian Macfarlane is a Tokyo based journalist and media analyst. Please share this article and subscribe to help him continue writing. These articles are free to reprint or quote.