A newspaper in Iran closely affiliated with the country’s ruler Ali Khamenei has called the assassination attempt on author Salman Rushdie “divine vengeance”.
Iran’s government and top officials have not reacted to the attack in New York on Friday. While the hardliner media have welcomed the move implicitly or even openly, praising the assailant. Kayhan daily linked to the Supreme Leader, for instance on Saturday said “a thousand bravos” to the man who attacked Rushdie, implying that his throat should have been cut. In its Sunday edition, the paper said, “divine vengeance befell Salma Rushdie” and predicted that former US President Donald Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are next.
Some Iranian media and political figures have adopted a different tact accusing opponents of the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal of using the attack on Salman Rushdie as a means of sabotaging a possible nuclear agreement.
Proponents of the conspiracy theory claim there is a possible involvement of Iran’s opponents, particularly Israel, who want to discredit the Iranian government and sabotage agreement on the revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and lifting of US sanctions.
Hardliner Mohammad Marandi who has acted as a spokesman-cum-advisor of the Iranian negotiators in Vienna nuclear talks, tweeted that he would not be shedding tears “for a writer who spouts hatred and contempt for Muslims and Islam” but went on to ask if it “isn’t odd that as we near a potential nuclear deal, the US makes claims about a hit on Bolton... and then this happens?”
“I'm not an exponent of conspiracy theories, but simultaneousness of the news about plans to assassinate [John] Bolton and the attack on Rushdie with the finalization of talks to restore the JCPOA isn’t not credible to me,” reformist' politician and commentator Abbas Abdi who is an ardent critic of the Raisi government, tweeted.
It is quite possible that the recent ‘plots’ against US officials and citizen as well as Rushdie were organized by the Israeli intelligence to prevent diplomatic solutions to the disputes between Tehran and Washington, Reza Nasri, a commentaor said in a tweet while in a commentary Saturday the conservative Alef news website said the West would devise ‘propaganda scenarios’ against Iran revolving around the attack on Rushdie.
Others on social media have seen these statements as an attempt by Iran to create confusion to deflect blame for a death fatwa issued 34 years ago against Rushdie that could have led to the Friday knife attack.
The 15 Khordad Foundation, a charity organization that put the multi-million-dollar bounty on Rushdie’s head in 1989 and even increased it by half a million to $3.3 million in 2012, has so far remained silent about the assassination attempt.
Hadi Matar (24), the suspect in the stabbing of Rushdie at an event in New York state, has now been charged with attempted murder and is being held without bond, prosecutors in Chautauqua County said on Saturday.
A preliminary law enforcement review of Matar's social media accounts showed he was sympathetic to Shi'ite extremism and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), although no definitive links had been found, according to NBC New York.
In the US, Republicans have demanded that the Biden administration must put an end to negotiations with Iran in view of the terrorist act against Rushdie sanctioned by Khomeini's fatwa as well as the alleged recent Iranian plots against US officials and citizens including John Bolton, Mark Pompeo, and Masih Alinejad, an Iranian American activist.