Author Salman Rushdie at the Vaclav Havel Center on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023, in New York. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Indian-British author backtracks on support of Palestinian state, slams student protesters backing ‘fascist terror group’ Hamas.
By David Rosenberg, World Israel News
Indian-British author Salman Rushdie took aim at anti-Israel protesters in the West Sunday and warned against the formation of a Palestinian state.
Speaking with the German paper Bild, Rushdie backtracked on his past support of Palestinian statehood, arguing that the formation of such a state today would lead to a “Taliban-like” regime under Hamas and controlled by Tehran.
“But if there were a Palestinian state now, it would be run by Hamas and we would have a Taliban-like state,” Rushdie said. “a satellite state of Iran.”
He then went on to criticize anti-Israel protesters in the West who have demanded the establishment of a Palestinian state.
“Is this what the progressive movements of the Western Left want to create?”
Rushdie said that support for the “fascist terror group” Hamas among young progressives in the West was “strange,” and said the protests’ increasingly antisemitic rhetoric was “problematic.”
“When it slides into antisemitism and sometimes even support for Hamas, then it becomes problematic.”
It all started with them,” Rushdie continued, saying that Israel’s critics must acknowledge that Hamas is to blame for the current war in Gaza.
The 76-year-old novelist was born to a Kashmiri Muslim family in India, and immigrated to Britain at the age of 17.
Distancing himself from his Muslim heritage and identifying for most of his life as an atheist, Rushdie sparked controversy in the Islamic world with his 1988 book The Satanic Verses.
The book prompted Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death. The controversy ultimately led to a major diplomatic row between Tehran and London.
In 2022, an American Shi’ite Muslim man of Iranian heritage stabbed Rushdie 10 times during a lecture in New York State, apparently in response to Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa.
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