A federal jury convicted Hadi Matar on terrorism charges Wednesday for the attempted murder of author Salman Rushdie — an attack carried out on American soil in service of a foreign theocracy's death warrant, and the latest proof that religious extremism will cross oceans to silence free expression.
Matar, 28, of Fairview, N.J., was already serving a 25-year state sentence for attempted murder. The federal conviction on charges of providing material support to Hezbollah and committing an act of transnational terrorism carries a maximum of life in prison. Sentencing is set for Nov. 3.
The stakes for ordinary Americans are plain: a U.S.-born citizen radicalized by a foreign regime's religious edict nearly assassinated a man on a lecture stage in western New York. The same ideology that sent Matar onto that stage with a knife and a fake ID — bearing the surname of Hezbollah's former security chief, Imad Mughniyeh — is the one that demands silence from anyone who questions its tenets. Today it's a novelist. Tomorrow it could be anyone who speaks out of turn.
Rushdie, 79, was stabbed 15 times at the Chautauqua Institution on Aug. 12, 2022, as he was about to speak on writers' safety. He lost vision in his right eye and suffered severe nerve damage. At trial, Rushdie removed his glasses so the jury could see the damage. "I can't say what his ambitions or his aim was, but the wounds were dispersed across my body," he testified, according to the New York Post.
Prosecutors laid out Matar's extensive planning. He spent more than a year researching the 1989 fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — a religious death decree calling for Rushdie's murder over his novel "The Satanic Verses." Matar discussed the fatwa with contacts in Iran, Australia, and Canada via messaging apps, fuming that Rushdie had "attacked Islam" and, by surviving, "emboldened others to insult the faith," the Post reported. He visited a Hezbollah-run website the morning of the attack and took screenshots of dead Hezbollah operatives. Photos of Hezbollah symbols were found in his New Jersey bedroom and on his computer.
The fatwa was never rescinded. Khomeini's successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reaffirmed it in 2017. An Iranian foundation has offered a bounty exceeding $3 million for Rushdie's killing. At least 45 people died in riots over the book; a Japanese translator was stabbed to death, an Italian translator was attacked, and the Norwegian publisher survived a shooting.
U.S. Attorney Michael DiGiacomo stated plainly that Matar "chose to align his values with the terroristic values of the leaders of Iran, which often promote violence, and in this case, the call for murder."
That clarity was too much for the New York Times, which framed the attack as Matar "carrying out the orders of the Iranian government" — stripping the religious dimension from the story entirely and recasting a fatwa as a bureaucratic directive. The paper's paywalled coverage offered little beyond that formulation before locking readers out. The Post and UPI, by contrast, named the ideology and its adherents without flinching.
Matar's defense attorney, Nathaniel Barone, argued prosecutors had no evidence of his client's state of mind and blamed the "current war with Iran" for making it impossible to get a fair verdict. Matar himself declined to testify. The jury needed just two hours.
The conviction is just. The open question is whether American institutions — press included — will ever honestly name what sent Matar onto that stage, or whether they'll keep laundering the ideology behind the knife.
