Cat Stevens has alleged terrorist ties

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-15-2004
Cat Stevens has alleged terrorist ties
14
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 9:30am
As Sean Hannity said last night, "So much for the Peace Train!" Then again, that may be his only option for transportation at this point. ;-)

Say, is anyone here besides me old enough to even know who Cat Stevens is?

Bev

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U.S. says alleged terror ties landed singer Cat Stevens on its no-fly list

By Leslie Miller

ASSOCIATED PRESS

September 23, 2004

WASHINGTON – The singer formerly known as Cat Stevens is forbidden from flying into the United States because of his alleged association with possible terrorists, U.S. officials said yesterday in explaining why a London-to-Washington flight carrying the peace activist was diverted.

The claim was disputed by the brother of the American-born singer, who changed his name to Yusuf Islam more than 25 years ago and lives in London.

David Gordon said his brother has condemned terrorist acts and donates money to terrorism victims. "He just wants to be an ambassador for peace," said Gordon, who lives in Princeton, N.J., and serves as Islam's business manager.

Islam, while in Washington last May, met with officials of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives "to talk about philanthropic work," according to White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan.

The office is located across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Buchan said that was before Islam was added to the no-fly list.

United Airlines Flight 919 was en route to Dulles International Airport on Tuesday when U.S. officials reviewing the passenger list discovered Islam was aboard. The aircraft was diverted to Maine's Bangor International Airport, where agents met the plane and interviewed Islam.

He was placed on a plane back to London yesterday. Gordon said Islam's 21-year-old daughter, Maymanah, was allowed to stay in the country.

In the meantime, there was confusion about how someone on the government's "no-fly list" was allowed to board a plane. Airline personnel are supposed to check passengers' names against those on the list. Anyone who matches is to be kept off flights.

United Airlines spokesman Jeff Green said the airline followed procedures in checking Islam's name and that it wasn't on the list.

Green and Homeland Security Department spokesman Dennis Murphy said the airline and the government are working together to figure out what happened. It is possible that Islam's name was spelled differently on the list, Homeland Security officials conceded.

Under rules imposed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, once an international flight is bound for the United States, passenger information is forwarded to U.S. officials. The data can include names, addresses, flight details, seat locations, forms of payment and meal preferences.

U.S. authorities provided few details about Islam's alleged connection to terrorism.

Homeland Security spokesman Brian Doyle would say only that the intelligence community has recently obtained information that "further heightens concern" about Islam. "Yusuf Islam has been placed on the watch lists because of activities that could potentially be related to terrorism," Doyle said. "It's a serious matter."

A second government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said U.S. authorities think donations from Islam may have ended up helping to fund sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, convicted for a plot to bomb New York City landmarks, and Hamas, a Palestinian militant group considered a terrorist organization by the United States.

Islam, born Stephen Georgiou, took Cat Stevens as his stage name and had a string of hits in the 1960s and '70s, including "Wild World" and "Morning Has Broken." Last year he released two songs, including a re-recording of his hit "Peace Train," to express his opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

He abandoned his music career in the late 1970s and changed his name after being persuaded by orthodox Muslim teachers that his lifestyle is forbidden by Islamic law.


Edited 9/23/2004 9:44 am ET ET by cl-bgs3

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iVillage Member
Registered: 07-12-2001
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 9:33am
OOOOPS!!! My apologies to Miffy and Renee for not taking off my CL hat before posting that.

Bev

girl in chair
Avatar for schifferle
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-27-2003
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 9:56am
<< Say, is anyone here besides me old enough to even know who Cat Stevens is? >>

Yes, 48 and counting. I have his records & cd's. Always liked his music and knew he ended his music career, became a devote Muslim and changed his name to Yusuf Islam. Beyond that I knew nothing of his activities all these years. Here's another article about him:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/667bkgnr.asp



Is Cat Stevens a Terrorist?

Why Yusuf Islam was turned away from the United States.

by Stephen Schwartz

09/22/2004 5:43:00 PM





ON TUESDAY, U.S. authorities diverted a United Airlines London-Washington flight to Bangor, Maine, where the ex-pop singer formerly known as Cat Stevens, now as Yusuf Islam, was questioned by federal security agents, and then ordered deported back to Britain. Yusuf Islam, it turns out, is on the official "no-fly list."

This action will doubtless provoke loud and prolonged guffaws from those who consider American security policies to be excessive. But a look at the career and associations of Yusuf Islam since he became a Muslim in 1977 shows that the decision was correct.

Yusuf Islam is already well known for his public endorsement of the death sentence issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie in February 1989. "Salman Rushdie, indeed any writer who abuses the prophet or indeed any prophet under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death," he said at the time. In addition, he has been barred from entering Israel because of alleged financial aid given to terrorist groups.

Is the singer a terrorist himself? Probably not. Is he an active sympathizer of terrorist groups? Perhaps not as much as he was in the past.

But Yusuf Islam is most certainly a fundamentalist Muslim, whose views are radical enough to set him at odds with the great majority of the world's Islamic adherents, and they are no better expressed than in his comments on his own field of expression: music.

Wahhabism, the state religion in Saudi Arabia, and the inspirer of al Qaeda, is especially known for its hatred of music. In Wahhabi theology, all music except for drum accompaniment to religious chanting is haram, or forbidden. For anybody who has had contact with Muslim civilization, this is a fairly shocking bit of information, since music is one of the great glories of Islamic culture.

Yusuf Islam has demonstrated his sympathy for this posture on several occasions. Above all, he is careful to point out his caution about bucking the Wahhabis in this realm. In 1997, he released an album titled I Have No Cannons That Roar, dedicated, he said, to the cause of the Bosnian Muslims. In an interview with Stephen Kinzer, appearing in the New York Times on December 8, 1997, he commented on the project, "I've . . . used a very conservative approach. You only hear my own voice, a slight choral accompaniment and drums. Let's say that's the safest option according to certain Islamic schools of thought. I've made minimal use of musical instruments, and in some schools of thought in Islam musical instruments are disapproved of."

This attitude was particularly dissonant given that Bosnian Muslim music is anything but conservative, and Bosnian songs about the recent war used violins, accordions, and numerous other instruments considered haram by radical Islamists. One popular Bosnian soldiers' ballad included a verse declaring devotion to their "old songs," which would be anathema to Wahhabis. But for Yusuf Islam, honoring the Bosnians, who had shed their blood defending their religious identity, was less important than honoring fundamentalism.

The album itself has been advertised in a misleading way by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), part of the "Wahhabi lobby" that imposes Saudi theology on the majority of American Sunni Muslims. The ISNA website falsely describes Yusuf Islam as "the primary composer and lyricist" of the album. Actually, he wrote only two of the songs. Most of the rest were composed by a Bosnian poet, Dzemaludin Latic, who is notably moderate in his views and--full disclosure here--a close friend of mine. When I saw him in Sarajevo a month ago, Dzemo Latic was writing a memorial article for Czeslaw Milosz, something Yusuf Islam would probably never think of doing. And the Bosnian songs on that album employ haram instruments.

Yusuf Islam's own website further reveals his fundamentalist and radical bent. It celebrates his collaboration with a notorious American Islamist, Shaikh Hamza Yusuf . Hamza Yusuf was known before September 11 for his radical preaching. In 1991, Hamza Yusuf "gave a provoking speech about why 'Jihad is the Only Way,'" at an International Islamic Conference held at the University of Southern California by the local unit of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a front for the al Qaeda-allied Jama'at-i-Islami movement in Pakistan. The same Los Angeles event was addressed by Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator named in 1995 in a plot to blow up New York City monuments.

At the 21st ICNA Annual Convention, held at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in 1996, Imam Hamza Yusuf declared, "I am a citizen of this country not by choice but by birth. I reside in this country not by choice but by conviction in attempting to spread the message of Islam in this country. I became Muslim in part because I did not believe in the false gods of this society whether we call them Jesus or democracy or the Bill of Rights or any other element of this society that is held sacrosanct by the ill-informed peoples that make up this charade of a society. . . . here should be no voting or debate . . . e have no room for ayes or nays."

After September 11, Hamza Yusuf adopted moderate camouflage and boasted of meeting with and "advising" President George W. Bush. However, at this year's convention of the Islamic Society of North America, on September 3, 2004, Hamza Yusuf declaimed, "the Republican party is basing an entire political platform, in the most powerful military nation on the earth . . . on the idea that Islamic fanatics are a threat to the security of this country, and this must be condemned. . . . I have never believed in my lifetime that a presidential election had any significance. . . . We must reject what is happening in the current administration in our name. . . . Those neoconservatives . . . that claim that this country was designed by people that wanted Christianity to be the law of the land . . . are telling a grave lie to the people of the United States." Hamza Yusuf followed up these rantings with fantasies of Islamic conquest of the United States and an endorsement of none other than Patrick J. Buchanan as a defender of "indestructible" Islam.

Those who scoff at the idea that the singer formerly known as Cat Stevens could end up on the U.S. government's "no-fly list" only show how unfamiliar they are with his beliefs and most prominent associations and activities over the last two decades.


Stephen Schwartz is the author of The Two Faces of Islam.








iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 9:58am
I think that putting Cat Stevens on the teroror watch list is fairy ridiculous, but I don't know the specifics. Sounds like he donated money to an Islamic Charity, which isn't necessarily supporting terrorism. Anyway, now President Bush can claim that 1/8th of the Nice Price bin at Sam Goody has been captured or killed.

What's actually important about this story is that someone on the terror watch list just walked right onto a plane. One excuse I heard was that his name may have been spelled incorrectly on the list. Given how complicated muslim names seem to westerners, this is not very comforting. Even Google has a "did you mean..." function. Can't the terror watch list ask "Did you mean Osama bin Laden?" I wonder if they've got him with an O or a U?

But here's something even more ridiculous. According to an article in the NY Times this week about the new screening system the TSA is developing: "Under the current system, the airlines check their passengers' names against government lists of suspicious people. But, the government, fearing that the lists could fall into the wrong hands, does not give the airlines all the names." Good thinking! Let's build a 10% failure rate into our security (I'm guessing on the percentage.) What happened to the terrorists only have to get it right once, but we have to get it right 100% of the time?

At least the jist of the article is that they're trying to develop a new system, but I can't seem to figure out what it is other than it involves checking out what your in-flight meal order is and if you prefer aisle or window.

Here's the fulll article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/22/politics/22secure.html

U.S. Wants Air Traveler Files for Security Test

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: September 22, 2004

ASHINGTON, Sept. 21 - The Transportation Security Administration said Tuesday that it planned to require all airlines to turn over records on every passenger carried domestically in June, so the agency could test a new system to match passenger names against lists of known or suspected terrorists.

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The data will vary by airline. It will include each passenger's name, address and telephone number and the flight number. It may also include such information as the names of traveling companions, meal preference, whether the reservation was changed at any point, the method of ticket payment and any comment by airline employees, like whether a passenger was drunk or belligerent in encounters with airline personnel.

The goal, the agency said, is to reduce the number of passengers selected for more intensive screening, including "wanding," pat-downs and hand-searches of carry-on luggage, and to increase the chance that people on government watch lists will in fact be searched. Under the current system, the airlines check their passengers' names against government lists of suspicious people. But, the government, fearing that the lists could fall into the wrong hands, does not give the airlines all the names.

The new order, to take effect after a 30-day comment period, would require airlines to provide the same kind of information on passengers that several, including JetBlue and Northwest, voluntarily turned over to the government or to a private company looking at ways to spot terrorists. The airlines were embarrassed by disclosure that they did so willingly.

"We believe the government needs to have a legal order to compel production of this data," said Jack Evans, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, the trade group of the major carriers, who added that delivering the information under government order would protect the carriers from passenger lawsuits.

The department's sensitivity on the issue is reflected by the fact that it is placing several documents related to the proposal in the Federal Register on Wednesday for public comment, a first for the agency, which is promising to listen to airlines, privacy advocates and others who opposed an earlier proposal. "We're giving them a chance to comment on the order, which we almost never do," said Justin Oberman, director of the Office of National Risk Assessment at the Transportation Security Administration. "We want to do this collaboratively," he said.

The agency plans to issue the order for the June records 10 days after the comment period, and if the test is successful, to start requiring continuous reporting in the spring.

The proposal, for a program called Secure Flight, replaces one for a program that was to be called Capps 2, for Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, but appears to contain some of the elements that privacy advocates had found objectionable in the first proposal.

In the documents scheduled for publication Wednesday, the security agency said it had dropped Capps 2 because of objections to "mission creep." Capps 2 would have been used not only to determine who should be subjected to additional scrutiny before boarding and who was on the "no fly" list, but also to catch people for whom there were outstanding warrants for violent crimes. The Secure Flight program will not be used to apprehend those wanted people, officials said.

But the American Civil Liberties Union said the program appeared to retain most of the objectionable features of the one that was dropped. By demanding the entire airline "passenger name record," the security agency would be receiving not only the traveler's name, phone number and address, said Barry Steinhart of the A.C.L.U., but also information like "whether you ordered the low-salt kosher meal and who is sleeping in your hotel room."

He said there was nothing to prevent the government from reviving the idea of using the airport security system to catch people wanted for unrelated crimes. But he added that his group had never opposed the idea of having the government, rather than the airlines, check passenger names against a watch list. "The question is not whether TSA should do the administration, it's what program they should be administering," he said.

He said he was struck by the argument that the agency did not trust the airlines with all the names of possible terrorists. "If they weren't giving the worst names to airlines, what were they doing? Who were they screening, then?" he asked.

Secure Flight continues to make use of another feature that raised the hackles of privacy advocates: government use of commercial data about citizens who are not accused of any crime. The T.S.A. said it would use that data with techniques used by private companies to find people who might be committing identity theft. In the agency's case, the object would be to find people who might be flying under assumed names, and thus might be security risks.

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But Mark O. Hatfield Jr., a spokesman for the agency, said that in every hearing where screening had been discussed, members of Congress asked how the security agency would ensure that travelers were using their real names.

Lisa S. Dean, the agency's privacy officer, said under the proposed system, "we're not looking for every passenger as a potential terrorist.''

"What we're looking for is the people who are actually on that list," Ms. Dean said.

But at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which recently used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain T.S.A. documents that showed how the Capps 2 program had grown beyond aviation purposes, Marcia C. Hofmann, staff counsel and director of the Open Government Project, gave Secure Flight a mixed review.

She said the agency had made a step forward by asking for comment, but she added, "The T.S.A. has exempted Secure Flight from as many legal obligations under federal privacy law as it possibly could."

For example, she said, federal privacy law usually requires that when an agency creates a system of records, individuals can have access to information about them, and correct or amend it. "T.S.A. exempted Secure Flight from that," she said. And the information could be used for activities that have nothing to do with aviation security, she said.

When Congress created the T.S.A. almost three years ago, it ordered the agency to come up with a better way to screen passengers; the one used now was invented by Northwest Airlines in the mid-1990's as a way to pick which luggage to screen, in response to the 1988 Libyan bombing of a jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland. The existing system, Capps 1, relies on factors like paying cash for a ticket and booking a one-way flight.

The agency said Capps 1 snags about 15 percent of travelers and Secure Flight would subject only about one-third that number to more intrusive scrutiny. Mr. Steinhart of the A.C.L.U. said the agency had no firm basis for the 15 percent estimate.

In fact, its record-keeping is so poor, the T.S.A. will not be able to compare those "selected" in June with the list of who would have been selected through the new system because the agency does not know who was picked in June for secondary screening.

One unresolved question is whether old airline computer systems can communicate successfully with the T.S.A.'s, and, if not, who will pay to modernize them.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-04-2003
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 10:06am
Yes...I remember Cat Stevens well. I have his album Tea for the Tillerman. He was one of my favoutires way back when I was discovering pop music (and I liked the 1970s Cat Stevens....people can change). Not much is known about him from that time to today. I liked his peaceful message and was disappointed when he stopped recording after converting to Islam.

<>

That being said, I don't like him emough to be blind to the possibility that he could be involved in questionable activities. Anyone who could change so radically or can be persuaded so easily should be looked upon with a little scepticism. Perhaps he (or his funds) may even be being used for things that he naively doesn't know about. Another possibility exists that he could still be the well intentionned peace loving individual that he was back then and may be one of those muslims of conscience that the world so sorely needs to step up and make their voices heard.

I think a lot more information has to come to light before I can form any sort of opinion one way or the other.

I think the bigger question remains....if he was on the watch list, how the heck was he able to board the plane?




iVillage Member
Registered: 04-04-2003
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 10:10am
Thanks for posting the article.

:o)

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-04-2003
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 10:18am
<>

I'm not too sure about that. I think I have to find out a little more before I can make any conlusions. I've always thought of him as a naive idealist. That's fine by me, I find naive idealsists very endearing.

However, since he is a naive idealist and has embraced some of the more radical teachings of the muslim religion....and since he is a person with a reputation for sympathizing with the underdog (or possibly the percieved "underdog"), I wouldn't put it past him to be involved in things (either by accident or design) that may have ties to terrorist activities or groups. Hopefully, that's not the case but it isn't ridiculous to be careful about that.

Fundamentalism in religion is a very dicey thing. This of course is a personal opinion....but once someone becomes that fundmentalist, I think their logic and reasoning can be questionable.

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-21-2004
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 10:25am

but once someone becomes that fundmentalist, I think their logic and reasoning can be questionable.


Donna
iVillage Member
Registered: 07-05-2003
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 10:28am
Hey, Moonshadow is a favorite song of mine...

I believe Cat has roundly condemned acts of terrorism, but has a bad habit of donating money to groups such as Hamas that are known to commit terrorist acts.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-04-2003
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 11:05am
<>

It even transcends religion. It can also apply to political philosophies etc...Religion however, is one of the most powerful forces.

Once you eliminate the grays and are left with only the black and the white, you distort reality. You are not seeing the whole picture.




Edited 9/23/2004 11:11 am ET ET by suemox

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-21-2004
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 12:12pm
I agree completely. Life is not black and white.
Donna

"Patriotism means to stand by the Country. It does not mean to stand by the President." -- Theodore Roosevelt.

Donna

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