by Judi McLeod
November 12, 2004
Funded-by-americans, former Soviet Union Leader Mikhail Gorbachev thumbs his nose at american authority. On Wednesday, Gorbachev will award a prize, through the international foundation he founded and operates, to a man expelled from the United States only last September.
The singer once known as Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam, was nabbed and expelled from the U.S. after authorities diverted his London-to-Washington flight to Maine to remove him, on suspicion of ties to terrorism.
On Wednesday, Islam, who converted to Islam in the 1970s, will be handed the Man for Peace award in Rome, where he’ll be feted by Gorbachev and Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni.
It’s not for singing songs like Peace Train that Islam, a 53-year-old British citizen, will be lauded as Man for Peace, 2005. "It’s for his dedication to promote peace, the reconciliation of people and to condemn terrorism," says a Gorbachev Foundation spokesman.
The Gorbachev Foundation operates from american soil with offices at the historic Presidio, overlooking the Golden Bridge. Indeed, the Foundation was bought and paid for with american dollars that pre-funded a non-profit nucleus for the Gorbachev Foundation then called the Tamalplais Institute.
and it all went down even before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev’s mad money to set up shop in america was courtesy of a fund-raising dinner at the posh New York Waldorf-astoria, attended by Henry Kissinger, representatives of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Ford Foundation and the Pew and Mellon Foundations, who ponied up a tidy $3.5 million for start-up funds.
The fact that Gorbachev has never renounced Communism hasn’t deterred him from conducting business in the United States. His having won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Peace has long eclipsed suspicion of Gorbachev’s motives.
The former Soviet leader, who also heads up Green Cross International, does activism these days.
Supported by a gaggle of Hollywood celebrities, Gorbachev, along with former President Bill Clinton and actress Sophia Loren, picked up a Grammy award last year for their recording of the Russian folk tale, Peter and the Wolf.
Islam, the future Man for Peace, was categorized in no-fly mode last September.
"Celebrity or unknown, our job is to act on information that others have given us," said Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. "and in this instance, there was some relationship between the name and the terrorists’ activity with this individual’s name being on that no-fly list and appropriate action was taken."
Officials said Islam was on the watch list because of his reported associations and financial support for Muslim charities with terrorist connections, on information that originates from outside the United States.
according to his website, Islam is associated with three charities: Small Kindness for humanitarian relief; Islamia Schools’ Trust for education; and Waqf al Birr Educational Trust for educational research and development and scientific and medical research.
In fairness, Islam posted a number of statements in opposition to terrorist attacks, most recently the school tragedy in Beslan, Russia that claimed the lives of 300–half of them children.
On his official website, Islam also criticized the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States and donated a portion of the royalties from a four-disc set of his music to the families of the September 11th Fund.
as Cat Stevens, Islam catapulted to fame with folk-rock hits in the 1960s and early 70s,
including his signature Peace Train, Morning has Broken and Wild World.
after converting to Islam, he dropped off the music industry’s radar screen for more than a decade, returning periodically to the recording studios during the 1990s.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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