Hadi Matar will likely spend the rest of his wretched life in jail. On Wednesday a federal jury in Buffalo, New York, found the 28-year old Lebanese-American man guilty of acting on the orders of Iran’s regime and providing support for Hezbollah when he nearly murdered author Salman Rushdie four years ago as he was giving a talk at the Chautauqua literary festival.
Matar was already serving a 25-year sentence after he was convicted of attempted murder last year in a New York court. But the federal case against him is important because it demonstrates the threat Iran poses not only to our republic, and our republic of letters, but to the liberties of a free society.
