For they are burying the little ones/ And they are making the graves deep.
They are burying the little ones/ And they make the graves deep.
Now they killed all the little ones,/with their eyes open wide
There was no one to help them/on the day that they died . . .
That was Yusuf Islam, the former Cat Stevens, known for songs such as “Morning has Broken,” featured on his “Greatest Hits” album. Last Saturday, the recording artist was singing unaccompanied at the “Great Palestine Meeting,” a massive pro-Hamas rally in Istanbul. The Muslim convert had also come to preach.
“My message today is to plead for an end to the bombing of innocent families, their homes, and especially the little children who make up half the number of the those who have been killed,” said Islam. “This is not a battle between equals. If we look at the attack on Oct. 7 comparing it to the scale of the vast military response, it is just beyond comparison. In Islam the protection of women and children and non-combatants is fundamental.” And so on, with historical background.
“One hundred years have passed, and Turkey is now stronger than ever,” Islam told the cheering crowd. “Before this we had 600 years as the ultimate empire, and when Jerusalem was under your wings, it had peace for 400 years. Allahu Akbar. I say thank you to the people of Turkey and the leadership of Turkey, for taking the right stand on this issue, while many other countries, especially the so-called international community, is falling on the wrong side of justice, even assisting this genocide which we are witnessing.” Meanwhile, in an October 27 Frontpage piece headlined “Genocide,” David Horowitz shares a few thoughts on that the.
“Israel was not created on Arab Land,” the Radical Son author explains. “It was created the same way Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Syria were created: out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. The Turks are not Arabs let alone ‘Palestinians’ – a national identity which did not exist at the time of Israel’s creation. The language, religion, culture of the Arabs around the Jordan River is identical to that of the other Arabs in the Middle East. The land on which Israel and nations like Jordan were created was controlled by the Turks for four hundred years before the creation of the Jewish state. There was no movement for a nation called Palestine in all that time.”
It is also significant that Yusuf Islam dialed it back “100 years,” when Turkey was coming off the genocide of the Armenians, with more than one million dead. For details see The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response by Peter Balakian. The former Cat Stevens seems unaware of the record, which the Turks have never acknowledged. By all indications, Yusuf Islam has no problem with it.
“Islam is perfect,” he writes in the account of his conversion in 1977, “and if we imitate the conduct of the Holy Prophet (Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) we will be successful.” Yusuf Islam was successful at supporting the Iranian fatwa on Salman Rushdie.
The Satanic Verses author “must be killed,” Islam said. “The Koran carries the death sentence. If someone defames the prophet, then he must die.” Remember, according to the recording artist, “Islam is perfect.” In 2020 Islam claimed “I never supported the fatwa.” In 2001, he denounced the “indiscriminate terrorist attacks,” of 9/11, hoping to “reflect the feelings of all Muslims and people around the world,” but there was more to it.
In 2004, the United States deported Yusuf Islam after he was found on a “watch list” because of “known associations and financial support to organizations believed to be aiding terrorism.” According to intelligence reports, Islam had given money to Hamas. For Yusuf Islam, supporter of the “ultimate empire,” these terrorists can do no wrong.
Like Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, they admire Hitler but, as David Horowitz explains, their true inspiration goes back much farther. The 1988 Hamas Charter, otherwise known as the Covenant of the Islamic Resistance, includes this proclamation from the prophet Muhammad.
The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
The Hamas cheering section denies Israel’s right to exist but Jews’ right to life itself is also under threat. Like Hamas, Yusuf Islam supports what Horowitz calls “the worst massacre of Jews for being Jews since the Holocaust.”