Common Sense

in the early morning on Friday, the 24th of September 2004 by Chad

Common sense is not normally found in newspapers, especially the opinion columns. But The Daily Times has an article on the Cat Stevens mess that has people writing in furious that have the opinion because he is a musician he is harmless. But this is the best disection of that theory I have seen yet.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where terrorism must be taken seriously here at home.
If that means that Cat Stevens can’t come into the country because he has a connection to a terrorist organization, no matter how ancillary that connection may be, then fine. We’re a safer country.
Racial profiling is flat out wrong when it’s done by police on the highway, pulling over African Americans just because, well, they’re African American, but there has to be some level of acceptability when officials question Muslims or middle Easterners traveling into our country after Sept. 11.
By all accounts Stevens was treated in a very benevolent manner, but for our safety, officials do check into certain people because they are either of Mid-Eastern descent or a religious convert. By all means, go ahead and do it.
And for those of you who say, “why should we be concerned with Cat Stevens coming into our country,” I remind you of Benedict Arnold who performed valiantly at the Battle of Saratoga, only to be convicted of treason. Or Aldrich Ames, who fed U.S. Intelligence secrets to the former Soviet Union. Or Alger Hiss, who worked in the Roosevelt administration in the ’30s and ’40s and all the while was a Russian spy.
Just because Cat Stevens is a musical icon to many people here in the U.S., doesn’t mean he has sanctuary here. He’s made choices in his life that have made him a possible threat to our every day safety.
He chose to move to Brazil as a tax exile in the 1970s. He stirred controversy in 1989 by endorsing Ayatolla Khomeini’s decree that Salman Rushdie deserved to die for his book, “The Satanic Verses.” Stevens later reversed that position, but he’s gone beyond the sensitive folk singer of the “Ëœ60s.

Hey, I might be a world famous network engineer, but that does not mean I’m not dangerous. Everyone should watch enough CSI to know that its always the innocuous housewife, or the entertainer, or the golfball salesman from Ohio who ends up being the murderer.
Just because Cat Stevens wrote hippie love songs back in the 70’s doesn’t mean his beliefs make him exempt from criticism, or being blocked from entering the country. No one has a right to enter a country except for its citizens.