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24 September 2007 - The One Where Max Curses the Ayatollah

I've been reading up on the Middle east recently. It all started when I watched "Syriana" and was thoroughly confused. Although, watching George Clooney get tortured gave me the same sort of orgasmic bliss that I get from watching Kirk Gibson hobble around second base. Before I started studying, Ayatollah Khomeini was just that guy on the t-shirt that Homer refused to sell at his yard sale. So I have resolved to take as many Gov't classes when I get back to CMC. I'm prepared to ditch my ignorance about that giant bed of sand that happens to be floating on a sea of oil.

But in my honest opinion, the greatest victim in the ongoing war between Islam and freedom has to be Yusef Islam, the artist formerly known to the world as Cat Stevens.



















In 1978, Cat Stevens converted to Islam and left the pop scene to focus on education and philthropy. In 1989, he called for Salman Rushdie's head on a platter, insisting He must be killed. The Koran makes it clear - if someone defames the prophet, then he must die." It's hard to believe that the man who warned us that baby, baby it's a Wild World, inspired us to ride on the Peace Train and told us that If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out was now calling for the blood death of a mediocre fiction writer.

Think about all of the great songs that we're never going to hear Sitting. The First Cut is the Deepest. Here Comes My Baby. Wild World. Morning Has Broken.
Where Do the Children Play? And "Father and Son" always gets to me. You'd have to be a glacier not to be moved by that one.

Ahmadinejad's political and religious extremism is evident on a global scale. You have a president who insists that Israel is a "disgraceful stain on the Islamic world" and it must be "wiped off the map" and who also claims that the Holocaust was a myth. And now he has successfully enriched Uranium. While all of these details strike us as enormous, it's the small details that demonstrate the true costs of this struggle. A popular, pacifist folk singer is overwhelmed by murderous rage over a Da Vinci Code-esque thriller and the world loses his music. It's just sad, is all.

So how do we avoid a nuclear arms race with Iran and (perhaps) regain one of the greatest folk-pop stars of the 1970s? Easy. We nuke the whales. Because we've gotta nuke something.

-MGD
Max Davison is a Junior at Claremont McKenna College by day, but at night he wears his underwear over his pants and fights crime.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Truly sad... someone's gotta play his own songs back to him.. :(
Anonymous said…
well...you should listen to the whole story before giving any judgement!! well I propose you should ask yourself why a man such as cat stevens or yosef converted to islam ...what did he find in islam and didn't find it in other place!!

this is my opinion

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