The Daily Beast is mocking author Salman Rushdie, who was brutally attacked during a lecture in 2022, for canceling a commencement address at a California university after Muslim students objected to his speech.
Rushdie suffered death threats for decades after the publication of The Satanic Verses, which radical Muslim clerics claimed was a mockery of their religion. Iran placed him under a fatwa commanding his execution.
In 2022, as Rushdie was about to speak at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, an American-Lebanese man, Hadi Matar, rushed the stage and stabbed the author, who nearly died and lost the use of his right eye.
Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison last week for attempted murder. Meanwhile, the Claremont Colleges Muslim Student Association (MSA) called on the college to disinvite Rushdie from its commencement. While claiming to embrace freedom of speech, the Muslim students argued that such freedom should not be extended to an author who supposedly had “disparaged” Islam, and who had also recently criticized the Palestinian cause.
Rushdie pulled out of the event — a decision the Daily Beast mocked, as if he had not been nearly murdered onstage for the reasons cited by the Muslim students.
The Daily Beast’s headline reads: “Salman Rushdie Scared Away From College Speech After Uproar,” as if his reasonable fear of bodily harm was somehow a sign of personal weakness.
The Daily Beast also quoted the MSA president as saying: “I’m surprised, relieved, and happy.” In addition, the article quoted the Greater Los Angeles Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which had criticized Rushdie’s “troubling statements about Islam and Palestine.”
Breitbart News has covered CAIR, and its radical Los Angeles chapter, extensively in the past:
CAIR is a radical organization whose executive director, Nihad Awad, praised the October 7 terror attack by Hamas against Israel.
As Breitbart news has noted:
In 2007-8, CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. That case, in turn, led the FBI to discontinue its work with the organization. In 2009, a federal judge ruled that the government “produced ample evidence to establish” the ties of CAIR with Hamas, the Palestinian terror organization. The United Arab Emirates labeled CAIR a terrorist organization in 2014 (a decision that the Obama administration opposed).
Moreover, the Los Angeles chapter of CAIR has a particularly troubled history. It recently objected to measures to protect Jewish houses of worship from antisemitic mobs, and in 2015 it offered to help the family members of the two ISIS terrorists who carried out a mass shooting in San Bernardino in December 2015. The director of the Los Angeles chapter of CAIR also said the U.S. was partially to blame for the attack.
Ironically, Claremont McKenna was formerly known as one of the only conservative colleges in California.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
