{"id":8451,"date":"2024-08-11T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-11T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=8451"},"modified":"2024-08-04T13:19:39","modified_gmt":"2024-08-04T17:19:39","slug":"a-sad-story-of-a-man-who-froze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/a-sad-story-of-a-man-who-froze\/","title":{"rendered":"A SAD STORY OF A MAN WHO FROZE"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The controversial novelist Salman Rushdie was born in India in 1947 and became a British citizen in 1964, and grew up without a touch of the gun culture. When his 1988 novel \u201cThe Satanic Verses\u201d came out, the Muslim world condemned him for it. The Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa <\/em>on him for blasphemy and put a price on his head. Rushdie lived for many years in partial hiding, often under police protection. In 1989, a radical Islamist preparing to assassinate Rushdie blew himself up accidentally with his own bomb. In 2010, Rushdie\u2019s name was found on an Al-Qaeda hit list. When the threats died down, he apparently became complacent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast forward to August of 2022 in Chautauqua, New York where Rushdie was about to give a lecture when a radical Islamist leaped onto the stage and stabbed him some fifteen times before he could be restrained. Rushie lost his right eye and the use of one hand, and almost died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His new non-fiction book \u201cKnife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder<\/a>\u201d was published this year by Random House. The story of his recovery is painfully, articulately described. Rushdie is obviously an excellent writer, and his comments on facing death and suffering an agonizing partial recovery would be inspirational for anyone facing the same things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Personally, I came away with a sense of sadness. Here was a man who had known since 1988 that he was on the hit list and countless people would have loved to kill him in return for a substantial cash reward if they escaped, and believed they\u2019d have abundant virgins in Heaven if they didn\u2019t \u2026 and did nothing to arm himself to preserve his life for  his loved ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He writes that he saw his attacker coming, apparently for more than long enough to draw a gun and fire in self-defense had he been armed. But, unarmed and helpless, he writes \u201cWhy didn\u2019t I fight? Why didn\u2019t I run? I just stood there like a pi\u00f1ata and let him smash me. Am I so feeble that I couldn\u2019t make the slightest attempt to defend myself? Was I so fatalistic that I was prepared simply to surrender to my murderer? Why didn\u2019t I act?\u201d And then he answers himself: \u201cThis is as close to understanding my inaction as I\u2019ve been able to get: the targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My students have heard me explain that \u201cfight or flight\u201d syndrome is really \u201cfight, flight, or freeze,\u201d and the ones like Rushdie who have the latter response always explain later (if they\u2019re alive to do so), \u201cI didn\u2019t know what to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rushdie had decades to come to terms with the grave threats against him and to learn what to do. He apparently couldn\u2019t bear the thought of owning a gun. Ruminating about allegories to the weapon that maimed and nearly killed him he writes, \u201c\u2026a knife is a tool, and acquires meaning from the use we make of it. It is morally neutral. It is the misuse of knives that is immoral. Whoa, I told myself. A hard pause. Wasn\u2019t that the same thing as saying \u2018Guns don\u2019t kill people, people kill people\u2019? Was I falling into a familiar trap? No, because a gun had only one use, one purpose. You couldn\u2019t cut a cake with a Glock, or cook with an AR-15, or open a bottle of beer with James Bond\u2019s favorite Walther PPK. A gun\u2019s only way of being in the world was violence; its sole purpose to cause damage, even to take lives, animal or human. A knife was not like a gun.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Salman Rushdie was as open minded as he thought he was, he would have realized that a gun can also protect, and today, he would be whole instead of maimed. His family would not have gone through the ordeal of nearly losing him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, by the way, the many death threats would have created an exigent circumstance which under New York State\u2019s doctrine of necessity would have been a competent if not perfect defense against the charge of carrying a gun without a permit there\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The controversial novelist Salman Rushdie was born in India in 1947 and became a British citizen in 1964, and grew up without a touch of the gun culture. When his 1988 novel \u201cThe Satanic Verses\u201d came out, the Muslim world condemned him for it. The Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa on him for blasphemy and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":8452,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8451","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8451"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8454,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8451\/revisions\/8454"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}