Oh, NOW the US government has decided that Yusef Islam aka Cat Stevens is our enemy. They were serious enough about this to re-direct a plane in midflight because he was on it, and a terrorist suspect watch list. LINK
Would that they had made such judgment several decades ago. Now he's just a silly white boy Muslim wannabe well hidden from view. He sticks his head out of his groundhog hole, what, once every couple of years? He's not doing anything to us. No significant threat there.
No, he was commiting his acts of treason against theology and geometry some 35 years ago. Where was all this federal concern when this terrorist owned the airwaves? Where were the federal agents when Cat Stevens was subjecting my tender pre-teen ears to wussifying male vagina monologues such as "Morning Has Broken" and "Wild World"?
Clearly, growing boys need a steady aural diet of life-affirming defiance, thus the holy blessing of airwaves full of "No More Mr Nice Guy" and "Smoking in the Boys Room." This was why G-d made radio. Cat Stevens and his ilk thoroughly and with malicious aforethought carefully tainted the Purity Of Essence of our souls.
Presaging the failures to control looters during our recent Iraq invasion, the US government failed to address the Cat Stevens/ wussy singer-songwriter crisis in a timely manner. If they had simply shot Stevens and/or Jackson Browne circa 1972 and made examples of them, or even just a couple of the lame-o DJs playing this crappy girlie music, we could have gotten some control before the situation got completely out of hand. Now instead, we are subject to every vile variation from Garth Brooks to Jewel.
Now we also have had long decades of al Qaeda operatives re-packaging these things to advertise as tv albums, subjecting innocents unborn at the time of his original atrocities against Art many hundreds of times to the soul deadening refrains of "Peace Train" and "Wild World."
Obviously these diatribes were the work of a master saboteur, out to destroy our manhood and will to fight back or even simply to survive in advance of terrorist attacks to come. Indeed, I'm sure they counted on some number of straight suicides from people seeing the ad for the tv album, and having that soul poison poured right in their ears again and again. Poor miserable bastards.
Hey, you might as well leave Yusef Islam alone. He's given up the airwaves, and poses no threat now. The damage has already been done.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Mark Saleski
wussifying male vagina monologues
nice touch.
2 - Eric Olsen
speaking of geometry, life's all about balancing the yang with the yin, and the Cat was great yin music - I listened to the hits package last night and almost every one of those songs holds up extraordinarily well
3 - Andrew Ian Dodge
Yep he helps raise money for Hamas, is judenhass and called for the death of Salman Rushdie. No reason to deny him entry there then...
4 - Jim Carruthers
I bet you give thanks every day that Jim Croce and Harry Chapin are already dead.
Hey, has anybody checked to see if those two are on the no-fly list?
It would be really funny if John Denver was.
5 - Eric Olsen
sadly, in an administrative oversight, John Denver missed his own no-fly list
6 - greg
Morning Has Broken is a great old hymn penned by Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965). If you're going to slag a cover of this excellent tune, why not go after Art Garfunkel?
7 - Eric Olsen
you tell him Greg, "Morning Has Broken" has made me cry before - in a good way
8 - Jim Carruthers
So how soon 'til we see the Don McLean Musician No-Fly Act (they wanted to call it the "American Pie Act", but those damn, filthy-minded kids ruined it for everybody).
9 - MDM
As I see it, Cat's less-known, very early stuff has held up (Mona Bone Jakon album, e.g.--see the title track and the song "Trouble" in particular), but not the sappy (if catchy) stuff that made him famous. I was into his music in a big way back then (early 70s), because it was great music to learn guitar from. But I never listen to it or play it anymore. His big hits all seem very fluffy these days--and he probably disavows them himself, in his midlife re-incarnation as a medieval-minded, murder-condoning religious bigot.
10 - Jim Carruthers
in his midlife re-incarnation as a medieval-minded, murder-condoning religious bigot.
So he's doing an album with with John Ashcroft? Kewl! Good thing Ashcroft has music to keep him distracted from doing anything really destructive.
11 - MDM
Mr. Carruthers: Such a good point you make. I'll just bet John Ashcroft personally funds suicide bombers and advocates assassinations of the author of novels routinely! Probably does it under an alias! Maybe there's a paper trail! Somebody get CBS news division onto this right away!
12 - Al Barger
Jim, I'll cut Jim Croce some slack. He did some fluffy stuff, but the two main songs that are constantly played on the radio are both pretty masculine. "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" after all is the baddest man in the whole damned town. I can work with that.
And of course everybody knows that "You Don't Mess Around with Jim."
13 - Eric Olsen
Musically, Jim Croce is unworthy of washing Cat Stevens's underwear
14 - Shark
Al, regarding your glorification of Macho Music --
It's especially ironic coming from someone who worships Prince.
You're really a girlie-man at heart.
15 - Mark Saleski
wait though...not only did al have that Prince poster on his wall, he also had the sorta-dead-chick poster from Black Sabbath's We Sold Our Sould for Rock and Roll.
i have no idea what that means though (probably, nothin').
16 - Andrew Ian Dodge
Mark, he has a variety of musical tastes?
17 - Al Barger
Shark, how do you take Prince for "girlie-man" music? He's a very masculine character.
18 - bhw
prince = masculine
lol, al....
19 - Rodney Welch
Give the man once known as Cat Stevens his due:
i Teaser and the Firecat, Tea for the Tillerman
and
i Buddha and the Chocolate Box
were pretty good albums, as I remember -- and "Peace Train," "Moonshadow," "Wide World," and "Longer Boats" were terrific songs from that time. He was an idol of mine back then, although I pretty much stopped caring after
i Foreigner,
and when he went all fundamental Islam on me and rejected his entire past -- the clear sign of a fanatic -- he pretty much lost me for good. He says now he never supported the Ayatollah's fatwa in the Rushdie affair, but I followed that case pretty closely and I seem to recall him not only saying it but defending it, and even at one point, expressing his pleasure that people were burning his old records. He liked seeing his past obliterated, I guess. I think of him as being like "King Tut" on Batman; I keep wishing a pot would fall on his head and he'd remember who he really is.
20 - Chris Kent
Did you know Cat Stevens was really just Don McLean in makeup?
21 - Eric Olsen
Rodney, that was about my experience of him as well - he claims to have mellowed, and he now embraces his past because it pays good royalties, which he can then turn over to charities, some of which are fronts for Hamas and/or the blind shiek
22 - Jim Carruthers
Hands up, how many of you are Roman Catholics? And of those, how many know what a Papal bull is?
And how many of those put a rubber on your willy?
Then you've violated a fatwah you evil hell bound scum (or you could ask Jack Chick how he would describe your subservience to the Whore of Babylon).
They still haven't finished pumping all of the semen out of Rod Stewart's stomach, and you're all beating up some Yusef Islam because you're too afraid of some bow-tied, suit wearing member of Nation of Islam kicking your ass.
23 - godoggo
Just thought I'd note that some commentors in this discussion over at Matt Yglesias today voiced some reasonable-sounding skepticism over the Hamas donations. Also, this may well be BS, but I remember Cat saying that he had been misinterpreted regarding the Rushdie fatwa, that he'd been asked about it before he'd heard what it was about, and had responded generally that he supported whatever the Ayatollah said.
So the guy's a creep at best, maybe worse,and I can't get too excited about this particular case, but the thing is that's it's not an outlier; much worse has been done to completely innocent people who didn't happen to be famous (at which point I suppose I should be providing links of my own, but it was some time ago that I read about it, and I don't feel like searching).
24 - godoggo
BTW for what it's worth, Hamas I understand is anti-Israel, not anti-US, and has both charitable wings and terrorist wings, which would I suppose give credence to the claim in the discussion I linked to that he did not intend his donations to terrorists, let alone the WTC bomber (vague about how the money ostensible got to him - incidentally, this isn't exactly an original observation, but he don't deport citizens who contribute to the IRA). Which is hairsplitting, I guess, but the point is not that I have sympathy for the guy but that I don't believe that all this makes us safer. Maybe if we could control his money somehow (yet another idea I stole from Matt's discussion)?
25 - Al Barger
Hamas may be primarily focused on Israel, though evil Islamic terrorists tend to run together. However, is Hamas not still on the official US feces list for blowing up hundreds of US soldiers in their sleep in Lebanon? That's probably more than any army of Saddam's has managed.
Anybody knowingly contributing to Hamas is literally buying culpability for the murders and other crimes commited by this group. That's rapidly approaching a point where I'll consider them outside of many protections of civil society.
I don't make any claim to knowledge about the activities of Mr Islam. Just this week with Eric Olsen's reports on this story have such accusations come to my attention. If he has in fact provably been contributing to Hamas though, he should consider himself fortunate that being expelled was the worst he faced.
In the original post, I'm just goofing on him for his cheesy music. However, contributing money to support one of the two or three most egregious terrorist groups going is damned serious business. I would tend to take a much less tolerantly bemused outlook.