Last Sigh?

It is no coincidence that Sir Iqbal Sacranie, as he now is, who used to march under banners reading "Rushdie Must Die", became an Establishment figure over exactly the same years that Marxist neo-Labour stalwarts did so, though, like them, without the slightest modification in his views on anything that really mattered.

Bringing us to the caterwauling from the likes of Nick Cohen and Harry's Place at the performance by Yusuf Islam, previously Cat Stevens, at Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity. Islam, you see, also used to be rather less than complimentary about Sir Salman Rushdie, as he then wasn't, presumably because he openly and virulently hated Britain, the country that he had chosen and which spent a fortune on providing him with ostentatious security of highly questionable necessity.

Rushdie ended up as pretty much the only person in the world keeping up the idea that the fatwa against him was still a genuine threat, regularly doing so live on BBC Two late at night, not to mention about the bars and restaurants favoured by the London literati. Who'd have thought to look for him there, eh? His antics are more than recalled by the frequent terror scares of the present age. Bringing us back to Nick Cohen, Harry's Place and the rest of Marxist neo-Labour.

Of course, what they really hate is that Stewart dared to be right about Iraq. No doubt he is anti-Semitic, since thus were all opponents of the Iraq War routinely branded by them at the time.