re: #101 Charles

Yikes, Cat Stevens.

My respect for him vanished when he supported the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

For what it’s worth, he claims it was a bad joke:

In 1989, during the heat and height of the Satanic Verses controversy, I was silly enough to accept appearing on a program called ‘Hypotheticals’ which posed imaginary scenarios by a well-versed (what if…?) barrister, Geoffrey Robertson QC. I foolishly made light of certain provocative questions. When asked what I’d do if Salman Rushdie entered a restaurant in which I was eating, I said, “I would probably call up Ayatollah Khomeini”; and, rather than go to a demonstration to burn an effigy of the author, I jokingly said I would have preferred that it’d be the “real thing”.

Criticize me for my bad taste, in hindsight, I agree. But these comments were part of a well-known British national trait; a touch of dry humor on my part…Certainly I regret giving those sorts of responses now.