A website that has been called a “clearing house for al-Qaeda material” in the United States recently posted a message calling for the assassination of David Letterman, according to SITE, a private company that tracks extremist Internet chatter. The FBI is currently investigating a commenter who made a post on the Shumukh al-Islam forum urging someone to “cut the tongue of this lowly Jew and shut it forever”—a call to action that's been deemed far more explicit and direct than similar threats made against South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone last year.
Letterman, of course, is the Indianapolis-born son of a Presbyterian church secretary, not so much with the "lowly Jew"—but no matter, as he made a joke mocking the death of accused terrorist leader Ilyas Kashmiri in his June 8 monologue, followed by a motion where “the despicable one put his hand on his neck and demonstrated the way of slaughter!!" Of course, the gag in question wasn’t so much about mocking Kashmiri, but rather another person who's called for Letterman’s head over jokes he’s made (albeit in a far more metaphorical sense):
"So (al Qaeda) picked a successor to Osama bin Laden and his name was Ilyas Kashmiri. Well, guess what, he was blown up by an American drone. It wasn't going to work anyways because they got off to a rocky start with this guy. He botched up the story of Paul Revere."
And as you can see in the below video of his monologue, Letterman never actually demonstrates this "way of slaughter." Although, along with awkwardly mocking Sarah Palin, he does use al-Qaeda as a launching point for similarly strained punchlines about Derek Jeter and The Tonight Show debacle, so there’s definitely some torturing going on.