The mother of Haiti Matar, the man who stabbed Salman Rushdie last week, characterizes her son

this way, as paraphrased in the New York Post, a basement-dwelling loner who barely worked

and never had a girlfriend.

The basement he dwelt in was his mother's.

She describes her relationship with him this way.

If I approach him sometimes, he says hi. Sometimes he just ignores me and walks away.

Back in 1989, when the Ayatollah Ruhola Komeni issued a fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie as

punishment for blasphemous writings.

I didn't spend a lot of time trying to visualize the kind of person who would respond to Khomeini's call.

But if I had, the result wouldn't have looked like Haiti Matar.

The Rosti attacker of my imagination would have looked less like a,

how can I put this delicately?

Less like a loser than Matar does.

Less like some deranged, narrow-do-well plucked from the headlines of the latest high-profile atrocity.

To put a finer point on it, the Rushdie attacker of my imagination would have looked less like Peyton Gendron,

the 18-year-old who three months ago shot up a Buffalo supermarket under the inspiration

of replacement theory, and who, until that day, had spent much of his time in the trailer

home of his only friend, playing video games. The friend's girlfriend said this of Gindran.

After 11th grade, he was considered weird because he did not talk much.

As a result, nobody, aside from her boyfriend, wanted to spend time with him.

The Homania fatwa of 1989 helped set off an effort by Western intellectuals to reckon

with a new threat emerging from the East, radical Islam.

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