Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen condemned the attack on British author Salman Rushdie. International and local media outlets reported that Rushdie was stabbed in the neck on a stage in West New York City as he was preparing to give a lecture. According to media reports, Rushdie is currently in intensive care on a ventilator and may lose sight in one eye. Frederiksen described the attack as horrific in a tweet and expressed her support for Rushdie and his family.
Salman Rushdie’s name came to prominence in the 1980s when he published the novel “The Satanic Verses,” which angered Muslim peoples because of what was considered an insult and attack on Islam and its principles. This led to the former Supreme Leader of the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, issuing a fatwa in 1988 calling for the blood of Salman Rushdie, and he has been living under security protection ever since.
Several world leaders tweeted statements condemning the incident and praising Salman Rushdie as an example of the struggle for freedoms.
French President Emmanuel Macron described the incident in a tweet as “a cowardly attack by hateful and barbaric forces… their fight is our fight.”.
After the novel was translated into several international languages, the Norwegian publisher Willem Nygaard, who published the Norwegian version of the book, was shot in front of his home in Oslo in 1993. Hitoshi Igarashi, who translated the work into Japanese, was stabbed to death at his workplace at the University of Tsukuba in Tokyo in 1991. In the same year, the Italian translator of the book, Ettore Capriolo, was attacked and stabbed in Milan, according to TV2.
The call for his death led to suffocating restrictions on Salman Rushdie's freedom. He found himself forced to live in seclusion, moving from one residence to another in complete secrecy and under heavy security for many years, living under the pseudonym Joseph Anton. In his memoirs, published under the title "The Memoirs of Joseph Anton," Rushdie recounts his years in hiding, his life under armed guard, his isolation from the public eye, and how this affected his marriages. The narrative begins with a scene of a BBC reporter contacting him on Valentine's Day morning in 1989 to ask about his feelings regarding the death sentence against him. This is followed by accounts of his movements under guard from house to house in remote locations, his interactions with his guards, his marriages and divorces, and the murders of several translators and publishers connected to the translation or publication of "The Satanic Verses.".
