‘Terrorism Should Not Terrorise Us’: Salman Rushdie Makes First Public Appearance Since Islamist Knife Attack
AFP — British writer Salman Rushdie attended a New York gala on Thursday night in his first public appearance since a knife attack that nearly took his life last year.
The award-winning novelist, a naturalized American who has lived in New York for 20 years, lost sight in one eye after being stabbed on stage in August while speaking at a US arts center.
On Thursday, he was given an honorary award at an event hosted by PEN America, a group that defends freedom of expression and literature, of which Rushdie was previously the president.
The 75-year-old, wearing glasses with a black lens over his right eye, was photographed on the red carpet for the gala at the American Museum of Natural History near Central Park in Manhattan.
His attendance had not been announced before he appeared to deliver an emotional address to the 700 guests.
“Terrorism should not terrorize us. Violence must not deter us. The struggle continues,” Rushdie proclaimed in French, Spanish and English, according to a PEN America press release.
Rushdie lived in hiding for years after Iran’s first supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered his killing for what he deemed the blasphemous nature of “The Satanic Verses,” published in 1988.
He has since become an icon of free speech and is still an outspoken defender of the power of words.
On August 12, he was at a literary conference in the small cultural and bucolic town of Chautauqua in upstate New York when a man armed with a knife stormed the stage as Rushdie was about to begin speaking.
He was stabbed around 10 times and Rushdie’s literary agent Andrew Wylie revealed in October that he had lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand.
Bystanders and guards subdued the assailant, who was immediately arrested, charged and jailed pending trial.
Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old from New Jersey with roots in Lebanon, pleaded not guilty to assault charges.
“If it had not been for these people, I most certainly would not be standing here today. I was the target that day, but they were the heroes. The courage that day was all theirs. I owe my life to them,” Rushdie told the crowd on Thursday.
In February, around the release of his latest novel “Victory City,” the writer said in his first interview since the attack that he had faced a lot of difficulty writing and was suffering from post-traumatic stress.
The attack shocked many in the West but was welcomed by extremists in some Muslim countries.
Turkey: Erdogan’s Alliance Brings Terror-Linked Islamist Party into Parliament
The newly elected Turkish Parliament will feature 16 different political parties, reports citing Turkey’s top electoral authority explained on Thursday, including a radical Islamist party accused of having ties to the Turkish terror organization Hizballah.
The Free Cause Party, known more commonly by the acronym HÜDA-PAR, is a small ethnic Kurdish party that supports the implementation of a sharia state in secular Turkey and whose leader, Zekeriya Yapıcıoğlu, has defended Hizballah as “not a terrorist organization.” Turkish Hizballah is a separate organization from the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah, but has repeatedly been identified as having friendly ties to Iran’s Islamist regime and is believed to be responsible for a wave of kidnappings, bombings, and guerrilla attacks in the 1990s and early 2000s. While attracting Kurdish Sunni Islamists, Turkish Hizballah is adamantly opposed to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a communist terrorist group also active in the region.
Yapıcıoğlu and three other members of Hüda Par will join the Turkish Parliament as a result of joining a coalition led by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the Islamist ruling party of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the “People’s Alliance.” The AKP-led alliance secured 323 of the parliament’s 600 seats in last week’s national elections.
Following the announcement of Hüda Par’s alliance with the AKP in March, those affected by Hizballah terrorism condemned the move as an insult to those killed.
“As a family, we know … that Hüda Par is a massacre organization. … Watching the formation of this alliance with them makes our blood boil. We don’t find it right,” Mehmet Genç, the brother of slain feminist author Konca Kuriş, said at the time in response to the party joining the AKP. Hizballah killed Kuriş in 1999.
The union is a natural extension of an alliance that had already been building between Erdoğan and the Islamist party, according to the outlet Turkish Minute.
“HÜDA-PAR endorsed the president in an April 16, 2017 referendum that gave Erdoğan broad powers,” the dissident news site noted. “All convicted and charged Kurdish Hizbullah members have been released from prison in recent years thanks to Erdoğan’s reshuffling of the judiciary through which Islamists were put in key positions.”
The May 14 election – the main event of which was the presidential race between Erdoğan and his top rival, secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu – were a heated competition for power between the president’s People’s Alliance and the CHP coalition. The CHP secured 130 seats in the parliament, boosted by dozens of seats in the hands of other members of its National Alliance – the conservative nationalist Good (Iyi) Party and several other small parties, such as the Democratic and Felicity Parties.
Kılıçdaroğlu lost narrowly to Erdoğan, but deprived the president of obtaining over 50 percent of the vote, meaning Turkey will host its first-ever runoff election between the top two candidates to decide an ultimate winner on May 28. Turkey’s Supreme Election Board (YSK) reported that Erdoğan received just above 49 percent of the vote, while Kılıçdaroğlu received about 45 percent. The results were a near-exact inverse of what national polls were showing the likely vote breakdown to be; Erdoğan regularly polled at between four to six points below Kılıçdaroğlu. The CHP has challenged the results of the election, presenting evidence of fraud or irregularities in thousands of ballots.
The closeness of the race, the strongest challenge to Erdoğan in his 20 years in power, elevated the importance of Turkey’s ethnic Kurdish vote to both sides. Nationalist parties tend to eschew Kurdish causes, while Kurdish voters largely gravitate towards parties friendly to them or led by Kurdish. The most popular Kurd-friendly party in Turkey is the anti-Erdoğan People’s Democratic Party (HDP). The HDP did not formally join Kılıçdaroğlu’s coalition – which would have likely alienated supporters of parties like the Iyi Party – but did not field its own presidential candidate, leaving Kurds free to vote for the CHP leader.
The HDP’s presidential candidate in the 2018 race, Selahattin Demirtaş, has been in prison since 2016 on unsubstantiated charges of supporting terrorism and ran his last campaign from prison. Demirtaş endorsed Kılıçdaroğlu this year. Erdoğan spent much of his campaign efforts on convincing nationalist Turks that a hypothetical Kılıçdaroğlu administration would free Demirtaş and thus support terrorism.
“They would take Selo [Demirtaş] out of prison. What did this Selo do? They killed our 51 Kurdish brothers in Diyarbakır,” Erdoğan claimed without evidence during a campaign stop this month.
The president made combatting alleged Kurdish terrorism a central theme of his campaign while simultaneously allying with HÜDA-PAR, a move outside observers deemed “desperate” and risky given the nationalist elements within Erdoğan’s own coalition, most prominently the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). The AKP announced its alliance with Hüda Par in March and, to the surprise of many, the MHP supported the decision by denying that HÜDA-PAR had any ties to terrorism.
“It is a known fact that the Free Cause Party [HÜDA-PAR], which decided to support our president and the People’s Alliance, was founded on Dec. 19, 2012. There has not been any persuasive and substantiated information so far for a clear relationship between the Hizballah terrorist organization and the Free Cause Party,” CHP leader Devlet Bahçeli claimed.
Bahçeli then accused Kılıçdaroğlu’s National Alliance of banding alongside “terrorist organizations,” without naming any. Bahçeli was presumably referring to the HDP, which is not a member of the National Alliance.
HÜDA-PAR’s presence in Parliament will likely become a critical campaign issue leading up to the presidential runoff election on May 28. On Thursday, Kılıçdaroğlu accused Erdoğan of making “bargains” with terrorists during a press conference in Ankara.
“Erdoğan, aren’t you the one who sat at the table with terrorist organizations many times and made bargains behind the door? What are you doing to slander us?” the opposition candidate asked. “Here I am open and declaring it again. I declare to all my citizens. I have never sat down with terrorist organizations, and I never will.”
Kılıçdaroğlu also bizarrely accused Erdoğan of “nurturing” Hizmet, the Islamic movement led by Philadelphia cleric Fethullah Gülen that Erdoğan claims is a CIA-linked terrorist organization (the Fethullah Gülen Terrorist Organization, or FETO). Erdoğan’s regime has arbitrarily arrested tens of thousands of suspected political dissidents for allegedly being allied to Hizmet.
The secularist newspaper Cumhuriyet quoted Kılıçdaroğlu as specifically condemning Erdoğan’s alliance with HÜDA-PAR in a social media video on Thursday.
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.
Ground Zero Car Jihadist Responds to Victims by Saying Killing Non-Muslims is Highest Form of Prayer
“I am following orders of Allah."
It’s certainly a good thing that a New York City jury refused to give Sayfullo Saipov, who murdered 8 people, the death penalty. The Ground Zero car Jihadist will instead spend life in prison feeding off American taxpayers.
Sayfullo Saipov as the Uzbek immigrant who ran over people in New York City near Ground Zero while shouting, “Allahu Akbar”, had previously told the court that “he cared about ‘Allah’ and the holy war being waged by the Islamic State”.
“They have one purpose, and they’re fighting to impose Sharia (Islamic law) on earth,” he said.
“The orders issued here have nothing to do with me,” Saipov told Judge Vernon Broderick through an Uzbek interpreter on another occasion. “I am following orders of Allah, who gave me life.”
Now at the end of the road, victims tried to shame him, but to no avail.
“This god you believe in, let him forgive you, because I never will,” Ornella Pagnucco, whose father was killed in the attack, said in Spanish.
Saipov believes in the death cult of Allah which views the murder of non-Muslims as the highest virtue.
That’s a point he made after the victim impact statements.
When it was Saipov’s turn to speak, he did not apologize. Instead, he delivered a lengthy religious speech, spanning from Adam and Eve to the creation of the Islamic caliphate. Through an interpreter, he called “jihad,” or fight against the enemies of Islam, the highest form of prayer.
Saipov closed his speech by saying that he had heard the victims during the trial — that he figured their tears could fill a handkerchief. But he said the tears and blood of killed Muslims could fill the entire courtroom. Then he praised Allah, just as he did at the end of his attack.
Of course he did. Saipov, like the rest of the Muslim world, is clear on what he believes. We’re not. That’s why we’re losing.
One of the survivors, Rachel Pharn, also closed her speech by praising Allah, while also condemning and questioning Saipov’s actions.
“Let’s be clear. Your actions did not serve Allah,” she said. “Your actions served no one but yourself.”
Miss. Pharn was run over but still hasn’t learned anything about the cult of death that did this to her.
“I hope for him really in jail he can come to a point where he can regret,” said Aristide Melissas, who was injured in the attack.
Not with his current belief system.
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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Lawsuit: Twitter Shared Identity of Dissident with Saudi Arabia who ‘Kidnapped ,Tortured, Imprisoned’ Him
Areej Al-Sadhan, a US-based human rights activist, has accused Twitter of sharing her brother’s identifying information with the Saudi Arabian government, leading to his imprisonment. According to the activist, Twitter shared her brother’s personal details, then “As a result, Saudi Arabia kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned, and —through a sham trial — sentenced my brother to 20 years in prison, simply for criticizing Saudi repression on his Twitter account.”
Ars Technica reports that human rights activist Areej Al-Sadhan claims Twitter gave the Saudi Arabian government access to her brother’s identifying information, resulting in the government kidnapping him.
Areej Al-Sadhan, a U.S. human rights activist, has sued Twitter on the grounds that the social media site broke its terms of service by disclosing her brother’s identity to the Saudi Arabian government. Following criticism of the Saudi government, Abdulrahman Al-Sadhan vanished in 2015. It is believed that he was abducted, tortured, and given a 20-year prison sentence.
“This puts every Twitter user at risk,” Areej said in an affidavit supporting her complaint. “As a result, Saudi Arabia kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned, and—through a sham trial— sentenced my brother to 20 years in prison, simply for criticizing Saudi repression on his Twitter account.”
Ahmad Abouammo and Ali Alzabarah, two former employees of Twitter, are also named in the lawsuit. Both were formally accused of spying for the Saudi government in 2019 and were accused of sharing private user data against Twitter’s privacy policy.
The case alleges that these ex-employees “unlawfully transmitted back the names, birthdates, device identifiers, phone numbers, IP addresses, and session IP histories associated with” 6,000 accounts that were critical of the Saudi government. The ex-employees allegedly accessed data 30,892 times, sharing confidential information on anonymous users with the government.
Areej’s lawsuit alleges: “Each time they accessed this user data, they committed a racketeering act in aid of the Saudi Criminal Enterprise’s goal of transnational repression,” potentially violating the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
Areej’s lawyer, Jim Walden, said, “As long as we lay idle while the rights of Americans and their families are trampled, authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia will continue to penetrate U.S. business and to use them as weapons for their criminality. We look forward to holding Twitter and the Saudi regime to account.”
The lawsuit claims that because Saudi Arabia is a significant Middle Eastern market for Twitter, the company is financially motivated to ignore Saudi espionage on its platform. According to the complaint, Twitter was made aware of the Saudi espionage as early as 2015.
According to the Washington Post, Twitter is likely to maintain that its employees spied illegally and without authorization despite these accusations. Areej is still working to get her brother back to safety and to make Twitter answerable for its alleged involvement in these crimes.
Read more at Ars Technica here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan
