David Letterman Receives Death Threat from Jihadist

posted at 9:52 am on August 18, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Terrorist Attacks ]   

Comedian David Letterman’s jokes about the death of Osama bin Laden henchman Ilyas Kashmiri have raised the hackles of a would-be jihadist, who has called for the late night TV host’s death.

In a seething rant on al Qaeda’s Shumukh al-Islam website, an individual using the likely alias Umar al-Basrawi derided Letterman as “a sick Jew with defined features.” Letterman is Presbyterian.

In the quasi fatwa, which was translated by the Site Monitoring Service, a private intelligence organization, al-Basrawi writes:

I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, one of the lowlifes of the Jews, and one of their pigs, mocking one of the leaders of the mujahedeen.

He then calls upon his U.S. counterparts to murder Letterman, asking “Is there not among you a Sayyid Nosair al-Mairi … to cut the tongue of this lowly Jew and shut it forever?”

Don Borrelli, a former assistant special agent in charge of the FBI-NYPD joint terrorism task force, is quoted as saying the rhetoric is no joke:

In general, you cannot write any of these off as a non-viable threat. These internet threats have been a rallying cry to ‘have the guy’s head.’ If I am the guy targeted in one of those things, I would be taking it seriously and hunker down.

Jihadists have threatened Americans before, including South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone for their depiction of the prophet Muhammad wearing a bear suit on the Comedy Central show.

In March of this year, a Pakistani terrorist group issued a fatwa on Florida pastor Terry Jones, who torched a copy of the Koran. Muslims in one Afghanistan town were so incensed by the action that they took to the streets where they proceeded—irony of ironies—to burn some half dozen copies of the Koran!

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