Earlier: Diversity Is Our Strength: Rushdie Knife Suspect Is Shia Muslim Who Supports Iran and National Immigration Safety Board Roundup: Tsarnaevs, Shooters, Slave Holders, Ebola Carriers And Meskhetian Turkish Refugee Streetracers
Seventy-five-year old novelist Salman Rushdie was sitting down onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York’s once Burnt-Over District, an extremely genteel 19th century campground devoted to uplifting lectures in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, when a man named Hadi Matar, a violent Shi’ite, rushed onstage and stabbed him repeatedly. Rushdie may survive, but his agent says he is severely injured.
After the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a death-sentence fatwa against Rushdie in 1989, he had to go into hiding for many years. But he’d returned to public life in this century as the threat seemed to diminish.
Matar was last known to be living in New Jersey. Where he came from is unknown at present. I don’t know whether he is an immigrant or the child of immigrants.
But I want to reiterate my long-standing call for a National Immigration Safety Board modeled on the successful National Transportation Safety Board. Obviously, we can’t investigate in depth every single time an immigrant or child of immigrants goes off the rails the way the NTSB investigates every single airliner crash and offers guidelines for how to prevent future recurrences.
But we certainly have the resources to investigate how the immigration system screwed up enough to permit the, say, two dozen most outrageous immigration-related incidents each year.
