Sounds like Salman Rushdie wrote an opportunistic, deliberately provocative book, hoping to garner lots of free publicity, and got a little more than he bargained for, the Ayatollah delivered an opportunistic Fatwa, hoping to stir up the faithful worldwide, and achieved nothing remotely useful thereby, and a clever reporter seized an opportunity of his own to spring a trap on a onetime pop star in order to get a good story, and succeeded tremendously, and Yusuf Islam got caught unawares in a witch's nest not of his own devising and is still having to defend himself many years later over it.

I call that just a sad tale of multiple human frailties playing themselves out in the theatre of the absurd...