Will a hit be put out on U2 this fall for their crime of teaming up with Salman Rushdie — the noted author condemned to death by Iran’s Ayatollah for his “blasphemous” novel “The Satanic Verses”?

Speaking yesterday at upstate New York’s Bard College on the eve of the release of his new novel “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” Rushdie said the cause-championing Irish rockers have put music to a lyric he’s written into his new book and will include the completed song in the next U2 album, due in September.

According to our spy (Bard-attending daughter Hilary), who sat in on the lecture, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” is a told-in-flashback saga of India’s top female rock star, who’s been killed in an earthquake, her surviving husband (also a musician) and a photographer.

Evidently, not every musician sent an advance of Rushdie’s book was as impressed as U2. “Madonna put her copy in a shredding machine,” Rushdie told the students. “I was hoping to sticker the cover, ‘As shredded by Madonna,’ but we were advised not to.” No sense getting her spiritual followers in an uproar, too.

Rushdie, who still travels on the sly with a phalanx of security guards, made his Bard appearance with only a few hours of advance notice, and still packed the university auditorium. Doubtless other stops on his book-publicizing tour will be just as cautiously undertaken.

© 1999 Philadelphia Daily News. All rights reserved.

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