A federal jury this week convicted Hadi Matar on terrorism charges connected to his 2022 stabbing attack on author Salman Rushdie, and while the verdict itself was close to expected, the case underneath it deserves more attention than a single news cycle usually gives it.
The facts, as prosecutors laid them out and the jury accepted: Matar, now 28 and from Fairview, New Jersey, spent more than a year immersing himself in Hizballah’s ideology before rushing the stage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York on August 12, 2022, where Rushdie was set to speak. Matar stabbed Rushdie repeatedly in the head, neck, torso, and left hand, leaving him blind in one eye with lasting nerve damage. The attack, according to the federal case, was motivated by a decades-old fatwa issued by Iran’s ayatollahs calling for Rushdie’s death over his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” — a fatwa that predates Matar’s own birth by roughly a decade and a half. This federal conviction is separate from and in addition to the 25-year state sentence Matar is already serving for attempted murder. The federal jury found him guilty of attempting to provide material support to Hizballah, a designated foreign terrorist organization, along with committing an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries and providing material support to terrorists. He faces up to life in prison, with federal sentencing set for November 3.
Here’s why this case is bigger than one violent man acting on an old grudge inherited from a regime he wasn’t alive to remember firsthand. The federal terrorism charges — as opposed to the state attempted-murder conviction Matar already faced — establish something specific in American law: an attack carried out on U.S. soil, against an individual, in service of a foreign government’s decades-old religious edict, can be prosecuted as an act of international terrorism rather than treated purely as an individual violent crime. That distinction matters because it acknowledges what should have been obvious from the moment Matar’s ideological trail became public — this wasn’t a random act of violence against a public figure. It was the domestic execution of a foreign state’s stated intent to kill a specific writer for the content of a specific book, carried out nearly 35 years after that book’s publication and after multiple attempts by other people over the decades to fulfill the same fatwa.
I don’t think this story gets the sustained attention it deserves, partly because Rushdie survived and partly because the free-speech implications make people on every side of the political spectrum uncomfortable in different ways. Free speech absolutists have to sit with the fact that a foreign theocracy successfully outsourced an assassination attempt onto American soil, carried out by an American citizen radicalized largely online, and that the legal system took years to formally recognize that as terrorism rather than a standalone stabbing. People more focused on foreign policy realism have to sit with the fact that a religious government thousands of miles away, and decades removed from the original controversy, can still reach into a lecture hall in rural New York and nearly succeed in killing a novelist for a work of fiction — and that the deterrent value of a life sentence against Matar does very little to touch the ideology or the regime that issued the order he ultimately acted on.
I’ll say plainly where I land: this verdict is correct, and it’s overdue. A society that wants to keep the right to write, publish, and criticize — including criticism of religion, including criticism that offends people deeply — has to be willing to name an attack on that right as exactly what it is, even when doing so is uncomfortable, even when the perpetrator is a lone individual rather than a state actor standing trial himself. Matar’s conviction won’t undo what Rushdie lost. It won’t touch the fatwa still nominally in force in Iran. But it puts a marker down that matters for every writer, journalist, and provocateur working today: an attack carried out because of what someone wrote is terrorism under American law, full stop, regardless of how long ago the grievance originated or how far away the government that ordered it sits.