DEFIANT RUSHDIE TALKS AGAIN

Son of Satanic Verses author reveals he’s off ventilator... and says his ‘sense of humour remains intact’ after stabbing

SIR Salman Rushdie’s family spoke of their relief yesterday that he had been taken off a ventilator and was able to speak after being stabbed.

The 75-year-old received lifechanging injuries when he was knifed at least ten times at an event in the US on Friday.

However, the author’s son, Zafar, said yesterday that his ‘defiant sense of humour remains intact’.

The author – who has had an Iranian death sentence hanging over him since 1989 after writing The Satanic Verses – was left with damage to his liver and severed nerves in one arm, and his agent has said he could lose his sight in one eye.

He was attacked on stage as he prepared to give a lecture at New York state’s Chautauqua Institution.

Zafar Rushdie said Sir Salman’s family were at his hospital bedside, adding: ‘He was taken off the ventilator and additional oxygen and he was able to say a few words.

‘Though his life-changing injuries are severe, his usual feisty and defiant sense of humour remains intact.’

The 42-year-old said his family was ‘so grateful’ to audience members who attempted to defend the author

‘The road to recovery will be long’

from his assailant, and praised an ‘outpouring of love and support from around the world’.

Sir Salman’s agent, Andrew Wylie, said: ‘The road to recovery has begun. It will be long; the injuries are severe, but his condition is headed in the right direction.’

The Indian-born writer has lived under the threat of violence since 1989, when Iran’s then ‘supreme leader’, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, or decree, declaring The Satanic Verses to be blasphemous and urging Muslims to kill him.

Sir Salman lived in hiding for ten years in London under police protection, but gradually returned to public life after Iran government withdrew its support for the death sentence – without formally rescinding it.

In an interview this month, Sir Salman said his life was now ‘very normal’, despite some extremists continuing to back the fatwa.

His alleged assailant, Hadi Matar, 24, was said by US media to be sympathetic to Shia extremism and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He appeared at Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York, on Saturday and pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault.

Prosecutors called the attack ‘targeted, unprovoked and pre-planned’, and said he had bought an advance pass to the lecture and arrived a day early with a fake ID. He was born in the US to Lebanese parents from Yaroun, a stronghold of the Iranianbacked terror group Hezbollah.

He is believed to have lived with his mother and two sisters in Fairview, New Jersey, where neighbours described them as a ‘normal, very nice, very American family’.

Matar is said to be a devout Muslim and loner, but friends said he had not

spoken of Iran or Sir Salman. The suspected assailant was wrestled to the ground after running on the stage and stabbing the author repeatedly.

Henry Reese, who was to lead an on-stage discussion with Sir Salman, and was also hurt, said at first he thought the attack was a ‘bad prank’ as it ‘didn’t have any sense of reality’. ÷ prince Charles has been criticised for his alleged views on Sir Salman by french philosopher Bernard-Henri levy, a friend of the author. He claims he asked Charles his view on Sir Salman after Iran called for the author to be killed.

Writing in the newspaper le Journal du Dimanche yesterday, Mr levy added: ‘Charles growled that Rushdie was not a good writer and added, “His protection costs the British Crown very dear”.’

He said novelist Martin Amis, who was with them at the British embassy in paris, replied: ‘It costs even more to protect the prince of Wales who has published, as far as we know, nothing of great interest.’

WHAT’S the difference between an Islamic fundamentalist and a trans-rights extremist? Not as much as we may have thought, it seems.

Where crushing free speech is concerned they are very much on the same page.

These apparently disparate groups stand together in trying to silence JK Rowling for the sin of speaking her mind – first over the rights of natural-born women, now in support of Salman Rushdie.

It takes the maxim that my enemy’s enemy is my friend to absurd limits. However, this is what we’ve come to after years of allowing freedom of expression to be chipped away.

Yes, the attack on Mr Rushdie is an extreme and hideous example of intolerance. But it’s also what can happen when ideas and opinions are censored by the mob. We are not there in Britain yet.

But cancel culture and spewing hatred by Twitterstorm put us on a slippery slope.

A feminist who believes people can change gender but not sex. A history don who says the British Empire may not have been wholly bad. Almost anyone on the Conservative side of politics.

Under the new orthodoxy, these are the worst kinds of heretics. On the pretext of diversity and inclusion, new woke inquisitors are trampling over this country’s global reputation as a beacon of freedom.

To her credit, Attorney General Suella Braverman is fighting back. In the Mail earlier this month, she vowed to take on the diversity lobby and restore some sanity to public debate.

It’s a cause the vast majority of the public will applaud and one the new Prime Minister must take up with gusto.

In these bitter culture wars, pacifism is no longer an option.