Web Desk (LTN NEWS): Chairman and former Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Saturday that the British newspaper The Guardian took “out of context” what he said about the attack on author Salman Rushdie.
In an interview with the UK-based publication on Friday, Imran was quoted as saying that the knife attack on the Indian-born novelist was “sad” and “terrible,” and that it could not be justified in the name of Islam.
“Rushdie knew what was going on because he was raised in a Muslim family. He knows how much love, respect, and reverence we have for prophets. He was aware of that. So I could understand the anger, but you can’t explain what happened,” the head of the PTI said about the attack that put Rushdie on a ventilator.
But in an early Saturday morning tweet from the PTI’s official account, Imran said that his words had been taken out of context.
He said that he had turned down Rushdie’s invitation to the Indian seminar because it was too far away. “In the interview, I talked about how Muslims punish people who say bad things about religion.
“I used the Sialkot incident as an example and talked about Rushdie in the same context,” Imran said, referring to the horrible death of a Sri Lankan man on blasphemy charges last year.
Rushdie was stabbed in the neck and torso at a lecture in New York State on August 12. He had been threatened with death because of the sacrilegious things he wrote.
The 75-year-old writer was about to talk to hundreds of people at Chautauqua Institution in western New York about artistic freedom when a man rushed to the stage and lunged at him. Since the late 1980s, there has been a bounty on his head.
When Rushdie fell to the floor, shocked people helped pull the man off of him. The attacker was caught by a New York State Police trooper who was there to keep the event safe. Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old man from Fairview, New Jersey, who bought a ticket to the event, was named by the police as the person who did it.
