At Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity”, one featured performer was Cat Stevens, a.k.a. Yusuf Islam, who is notorious for endorsing the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie:
Robertson: You don’t think that this man deserves to die?
Y. Islam: Who, Salman Rushdie?
Robertson: Yes.
Y. Islam: Yes, yes.
Robertson: And do you have a duty to be his executioner?
Y. Islam: Uh, no, not necessarily, unless we were in an Islamic state and I was ordered by a judge or by the authority to carry out such an act – perhaps, yes.[Some minutes later, Robertson on the subject of an protest where an effigy of the author is to be burned]
Robertson: Would you be part of that protest, Yusuf Islam, would you go to a demonstration where you knew that an effigy was going to be burned?
Y. Islam: I would have hoped that it’d be the real thing
Shortly thereafter, Stevens/Islam told the New York Times that he stood by his comments. (Now he claims he was only joking.)
This is what Stewart considers sanity?
POSTSCRIPT: The rally to restore smugness.
UPDATE: Ed Driscoll has the video.
UPDATE: Jon Stewart reportedly stands by the decision to include Stevens.
UPDATE: The site with the article on Stewart standing by Stevens is down, but you can see the article in the Google cache.
Internet Scofflaw 