When it comes to Friday’s near-fatal attack on novelist Salman Rushdie, what President Joe Biden didn’t say said it all.
The Indian-born writer — a naturalized American citizen — was fighting for his life on Sunday after a vicious stabbing Friday on stage, just before he was to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York state.
On Saturday, the Biden White House issued a statement denouncing the attack, but there was one crucial detail that went unmentioned — the virtually certain role of the Islamic Republic of Iran in inciting the bloodshed.
The suspect in the case, the man captured while attacking Rushdie so viciously that the writer is likely to lose an eye, according to the Associated Press, is a 24-year-old named Hadi Matar.
Matar, a law enforcement source told NBC News, has social media accounts that “he is sympathetic to Shia extremism and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps causes.”
Let’s see, what does Shia extremism … the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps … bring to mind. There’s a country that those two plagues of the planet are associated with. It’s uh, um, maybe the Islamic Republic of Iran?
The country that almost certainly provided the motivation for an attack on an American citizen, on American soil is Iran, governed by the murderous mullahs in Tehran. It’s the same country, coincidentally, that Biden is working with to reestablish the suicidal nuclear deal negotiation by the Obama White House while Biden was vice president, and that former President Donald Trump had the good sense to get out of.
So, naturally, Biden’s statement contained not a word about Iran — a crucial detail that might only upset one of his more deranged plans for the presidency:
“Jill and I were shocked and saddened to learn of the vicious attack on Salman Rushdie yesterday in New York,” Biden said in the statement, according to the White House website. “We, together with all Americans and people around the world, are praying for his health and recovery. I am grateful to the first responders and the brave individuals who jumped into action to render aid to Rushdie and subdue the attacker.
Do you think the Rushdie attack was Islamist terrorism?
Yes: 100% (54 Votes)
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“Salman Rushdie — with his insight into humanity, with his unmatched sense for story, with his refusal to be intimidated or silenced — stands for essential, universal ideals. Truth. Courage. Resilience. The ability to share ideas without fear. These are the building blocks of any free and open society. And today, we reaffirm our commitment to those deeply American values in solidarity with Rushdie and all those who stand for freedom of expression.”
As much of the social media reaction showed, that kind of pablum didn’t impress anyone.
Joe Biden’s statement: “Salman Rushdie—with his insight into humanity, with his unmatched sense for story, with his refusal to be intimidated or silenced—stands for essential, universal ideals…” Notably, no mention of the fatwa & bounty placed on his head by the Iranian regime. pic.twitter.com/Bq6eVhjDHW
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) August 13, 2022
America is so weak under his government
— Narciss (@Narciss06615487) August 14, 2022
Get ready for anonymous senior Biden officials to tell the NYT it’s wrong to hold Iran responsible for the attack on Rushdie. “We have no proof that Matar was controlled by Tehran. The nuke deal is good on its own terms and should go forward.” 100s of billions of dollars to Iran!
— Mike (@Doranimated) August 13, 2022
Iran has been plotting for the death of Salman Rushdie since 1989 and offered a bounty to anyone who assassinates him.
Yesterday, he was attacked on stage.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is open to having additional talks with this dangerous, terrorist regime.
— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) August 13, 2022
With that in mind, Biden’s statement doesn’t even stand on its own terms.
Yes, we for sure reaffirm our commitment to sharing ideas without fear, by being frightened to mention the country that is almost certainly directly or indirectly responsible for Friday’s attack.
For more than 30 years, Rushdie has been living under a death sentence pronounced by the now-deceased Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the America-hating fanatic who established the Islamic Republic of Iran, the largest state-sponsor of terrorism in the world.
(It’s the country where the United States is routinely referred to as “the Great Satan” and “Death to America” is practically a national motto.)
In February 1989, Khomeini, a leader of the Shiite branch of Islam, issued a religious edict known as a “fatwa” declaring that Rushdie deserved death for a novel he published the previous year, “The Satanic Verses,” that was critical of Islam.
While Khomeini died later in June 1989, his fatwa has never been reversed, as a Los Angeles Times timeline of the death sentence notes. And it’s survived into the 21st century.
Joe Biden was in his second term in the Senate when Khomeini rose to power. The former U.S. ally became a hotbed of Islamic terrorism, including a state-sanctioned mob taking over the American Embassy in Tehran, taking its personnel hostage sparking a standoff that lasted 444 days and delivered a humiliation to the United States that ended the Jimmy Carter presidency. (And paved the way for Ronald Reagan. The Lord works in mysterious ways.)
Biden was in his third term when Khomeini issued his original fatwa demanding Rushdie die for writing a book critical of Islam. He was in his fourth term when Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reaffirmed Rushdie’s death sentence in 1993.
It was that same Khameini who, as recently as 2017, during one the few years in Biden’s adult life that he was not holding political office, declared that the fatwa to kill Rushdie remained in effect, according to the Associated Press.
In other words, Joe Biden knows well the history of Iranian Islamic terror when it comes to threatening Salman Rushdie, yet his statement on Saturday about the attack contained not even the barest illusion to it.
August is clearly a bad month for Biden when it comes to being humiliated by Islamic terrorists he’s abasing himself to appease. It was a year ago that he was disgracing himself and his country with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, a black day in the history of the United States and a stain on the country’s honor that will take generations to erase.
And now, in a new August, he’s standing by impotently as an act of terrorism on American soil makes a mockery of his platitudes about “Truth. Courage. Resilience” — three characteristics in which Biden, his administration and his entire political party are noticeably lacking.
And so he pretends, with the connivance of the mainstream media, that the Rushdie attack occurred in a vacuum.
Had there been the slightest chance the suspect in this case had been a white, Christian man, there would be no end to the denunciations that flowed. We don’t need to look back any further than earlier this month when the killings of four Muslim men in Albuquerque, New Mexico, over the past year set off the usual round of hysteria among Democrats and their most eager lapdogs in the lapdog media.
(The suspect — to the surprise of almost no one who’s sensible — turned out to be another Muslim man. That story is going to disappear as quick as the one about the mass murder at a Christmas parade in Wisconsin last year, and any other story that doesn’t suit the leftist agenda.)
Of course, maybe there’s something similar at work in the Rushdie attack. Maybe it has nothing to do with a fatwa that’s been around longer than the suspect has been alive.
Maybe the suspect just really hated Rushdie’s occasional forays into poetry or his magical-realism approach to literature. Maybe our alleged knife-wielder preferred the terse, flat prose of a Hemingway, say, or the playful digressions and zany plots of a Tom Robbins, or the understated ugliness of Cormac McCarthy, to the generally flowery and entirely too “literary” Rushdie. (All of which would be understandable, if not exactly motive to murder.)
It could be anything really, and it could have nothing whatsoever to do with Islamist terrorism and its pre-Enlightenment barbarism.
That wouldn’t make a bit of difference.
The American public, the whole world really, has known for most or all of the Biden presidency that what the president says doesn’t matter much. He can make announcements about American foreign policy — like the country’s stance on Taiwan — without thinking, and even his own staff is accustomed to walking it back with sympathetic reporters.
But in this case, it’s what he didn’t say that mattered. What he didn’t say acknowledged that the president of the United States is groveling in front of one of this country’s deadliest foes on the world stage.
What he didn’t say admitted that he and his party are so terrified of offending Islamist terrorists that he’s willing to publicly comment on a case of virtual certain Islamist terror and drop not even a hint that Islamist terror is involved.
What he didn’t say confirmed, as if it needed any confirmation, that Joe Biden is not man enough, nor moral enough, to occupy the presidency of the United States.
It’s what he didn’t say that said it all.
