Get a load of the headline on this AP story about Cat Stevens: Singer Cat Stevens Has No Terrorist Ties. (Hat tip: ben.)

This is a quote from Cat Stevens’ brother. Shouldn’t there be quotation marks? And maybe an attribution, so that someone doesn’t read this as a fact instead of an opinion from a biased source?

Is this difficult? It looks like Journalism 101 to me.

By the way, one of our readers forwarded a copy of an article about Cat Stevens in the May 2003 issue of GQ Magazine, titled “How Cuddly is Cat?” It’s not available on the web as far as I can tell, but this article reveals that Cat Stevens has connections to some of the most notorious radical Islamic figures in the world, including Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad.

When the Islamic death sentence against Salman Rushdie was pronounced, Cat Stevens told Muslim students at London’s Kingston Polytechnic, “He must be killed. The Qur’an makes it clear: if someone defames the prophet, he must die.”

Also from the GQ article, about an interview with Cat Stevens’ brother David Gordon:

I ask him about something else I find, an old leaflet attributed to the Islamic Association of Palestine—a group U.S. Intelligence considers a front for Hamas—titled Eyewitness. By: Yusuf Islam (The Former British Singer Cat Stevens). “The Jews seem neither to respect God nor his creation,” it says. “Their own holy books contain the curse of God brought upon them by their prophets on account of their disobedience to Him and mischief in the earth.”