Ho boy. You make one lousy joke about the recent death of al-Qaeda leader Ilyas Kashmiri and people get all up in arms. Reportedly David Letterman death threats arrived on the site Shumukh-al-Islam from a poster named Umar al-Basrawi, following Dave’s riff on the deceased al-Qaeda leader. He wrote, “Is there not amongst you a Sayyid Nosair al-Masri (may Allah release him) to cut the tongue of this lowly Jew and shut it forever. Just as Sayyid (may Allah release him) did with the Jew Kahane.†For those of you not up on your nightmare history of our awful world, Sayyid Nosair al-Masri was tried for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990. EW, and many other sources, point out that Letterman is in actually not Jewish, a fact that seems really, really, really, really, really beside the point once people start threatening other people’s tongues online.
