Reuters on Monday dispatched reporters to the village of Yaroun in southern Lebanon, the “ancestral home” of Hadi Matar, the 24-year-old man who rushed onstage and attacked author Salman Rushdie with a knife on Friday.
Residents of the village said they knew little about Matar’s family and generally refused to comment on the knife attack, which was evidently inspired by the standing Iranian religious order to murder Rushdie for “blasphemy.”
Some Yaroun residents seemed slightly annoyed by Reuters’ interest, as they hastened to point out Matar was born in the United States, not Lebanon.
“He was born abroad in America and remains there. No one wants to talk about it because no one knows anything,” a local official growled to Reuters.
Reuters found some of these protestations of ignorance hard to swallow, because Yaroun is currently festooned with posters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, the late Iranian supreme leader who ordered Rushdie killed in 1989. Also, there are little monuments to slain Hezbollah extremists all over town.
Most of the villagers declined to comment on Matar and his actions, claiming they knew little about the case. A few pointed out the “simple cinder block building” where Matar’s father Hassan was said to be holed up, having refused to speak with anyone since news of the attack on Rushdie broke. Matar’s parents lived in California until 2004 when they divorced. Hassan moved back to Lebanon, while his ex-wife Silvana went to New Jersey with young Hadi.
U.S. media has been remarkably incurious about Matar’s background and motivations, so not much has been revealed about him, except that he lives in Fairview, New Jersey, and had online obsessions with Shiite Muslim extremism and the Iranian regime, especially its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the theocratic wing of the Iranian military.
Matar is presently in custody after pleading not guilty to second-degree attempted murder and assault. The official position of American law enforcement agencies is that his motives for attacking Rushdie are “unclear.”
Rushdie, 75, is recovering from surgeries to address the ten or more stab wounds he suffered in the attack. His son described him as “feisty and defiant” while remaining in critical condition. Doctors say he may suffer long-term nerve damage and could lose one of his eyes.
Foreign media outlets are proving more interested in Matar’s background than their American counterparts. The UK Daily Mail interviewed his mother Silvana Fardos on Tuesday, and she suggested Hadi became radicalized after visiting his father in Lebanon in 2018.
“The first hour he gets there he called me, he wanted to come back. He stayed for approximately 28 days but the trip did not go well with his father, he felt very alone,” she said.
Fardos said her son “changed a lot” after visiting his father in Lebanon, in a region where Iran’s terrorist proxy Hezbollah is very influential.
“I was expecting him to come back motivated, to complete school, to get his degree and a job, but instead he locked himself in the basement,” she sighed.
Instead, she said her son said little to herself or the rest of his family in America over the past four years. “He sleeps during the day and wakes and eats during the night. He lives in the basement. He cooks his own food,” she said.
“I just cannot believe he was capable of doing something like this. He was very quiet, everyone loved him. As I said to the FBI I’m not going to bother talking to him again. He’s responsible for his actions,” she told the Daily Mail.
Fardos added that while she herself was born Muslim, she was not actively religious at present, and was unfamiliar with Salman Rushdie and his work.
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