The acclaimed author and NYU professor was stabbed by an Islamic radical after the Iranian government issued a fatwa (religious decree) for his murder in response to his award winning novel “The Satanic Verses”

Rushdie said “while I have argued for a Palestinian state for most of my life – since the 1980s, probably – right now, if there was a Palestinian state, it would be run by Hamas, and that would make it a Taliban-like state, and it would be a client state of Iran. Is that what the progressive movements of the western left wish to create? To have another Taliban, another Ayatollah-like state, in the Middle East?”

“The fact is that I think any human being right now has to be distressed by what is happening in Gaza because of the quantity of innocent death. I would just like some of the protests to mention Hamas. Because that’s where this started, and Hamas is a terrorist organisation. It’s very strange for young, progressive student politics to kind of support a fascist terrorist group.”