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| 2015 |
"Israel mourns the wanton murder of innocent worshippers in Christchurch and condemns the brazen act of terror in New Zealand.Israel sends its condolences to the bereaved families and its heartfelt wishes for a peedy recovery to the wounded".
Binyamin Netanyahu
Ankara has opened an inquiry after it emerged that the man alleged to be the New Zealand attacker made several visits to Turkey.
A right-wing supporter armed with semiautomatic weapons rampaged through two mosques in the city of Christchurch during afternoon prayers on Friday, killing 50 worshippers and wounding dozens more.
The terrorist filmed his crime and the video is a hit on the internet. By looking through the killer's helmet camera, you could be harming yoursef. It is real life, not Hollywood. And it is real slaughter against real people. And if you're watching it for no professional reason, you are adopting his gaze, colluding in his attempt to humiliate his victims and becoming a "celebrity" somehow. Please don't indulge his atrocity.
A visitor believed to be a 28-year-old Australian - who has been arrested and charged with murder in New Zealand - "visited Turkey several times and stayed for a long period in the country", the Turkish official said without giving dates. "We think that the suspect could have been to other countries (from Turkey) in Europe, Asia and Africa. We are investigating the suspect's movements and contacts in the countries," added the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Turkish media reported that a manifesto published online allegedly by the attacker contained specific references to Turkey and ridding the famed Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Now a museum, the building was once a church before being turned into a mosque during the Ottoman empire.
Sofia earlier said it was investigating after discovering that the gunman might have visited Bulgaria in November 2018.
A man believed to be him spent a week in the country supposedly to "visit historical sites and study the history of the Balkan country", Bulgaria's chief prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov said. "The inquiry will establish if this was correct or if he had other objectives".The same man also made a short visit to the Balkans in December 2016, travelling by bus across Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
An abbreviated list of recent acts of white supremacist terrorism includes Robert Gregory Bowers' killing of 12 Jewish worshippers at a Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2018; Alexandre Bissonnette's massacre of six Muslims in the Quebec City mosque in 2017; Dylann Roof's murdering of nine black Christian parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina church in 2015; and Anders Behring Breivik's slaughter of 77 people in Norway in 2011.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, numerous other white supremacist plots, including some that planned to kill as many as 30,000 people, have been foiled by law enforcement in the United States. Just last month, the American FBI arrested Christopher Paul Hasson, a white supremacist and lieutenant in the US coastguard, for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks against black and liberal politicians and media personalities.
All of this is to say nothing of less recent white supremacist history, including anti-black violence perpetrated by US's Ku Klux Klan (KKK), thousands of 19th and 20th century lynching of black Americans by white supremacist mobs, millions of black people murdered during the African slave trade, or millions of brown people killed during the peak periods of Western colonialism. Scholars and analysts have cogently and repeatedly argued that both the African slave trade and Western colonialism were carried out largely in the service of white supremacy.
Although US and Western media in general as well as political elites spend considerable time discussing "Islamic terrorism", far-right, white supremacist terrorism is far more common. A recent study showed that two-thirds of terrorist attacks in the US are carried out by far-right individuals and groups. Research by the Southern Poverty Law Center, meanwhile, shows that most far-right violence is unambiguously linked to white supremacy.
In spite of the obvious and continued threat of white supremacist terrorism, Western societies still arguably do not take the danger as seriously as they should. A recent New York Times report showed that for decades US's "domestic counterterrorism strategy has ignored the rising danger of far-right extremism", which, the report also noted, is tied explicitly to white supremacy.
Political movements may help explain why many Western societies do not take the threat of white supremacy as seriously as they should - many Western political leaders are themselves beholden to white supremacy.
White nationalism has taken firm root in both European and American political mainstreams. In Europe, white nationalists have gained political traction and influenced elections and referendums, including the United Kingdom's 2016 Brexit vote, while in the US, President Donald Trump and numerous Republican politicians have been linked to white supremacy.
White supremacist and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke explained why white supremacists voted for Trump in US's 2016 presidential election, and Trump made headlines in 2016 when he refused to disavow Duke's support. In 2017, Trump famously equivocated on the KKK and called white supremacists protesting in Charlottesville, Virginia "very fine people". Earlier this decade, Trump spearheaded campaigns challenging the intelligence, grades, and citizenship of the US's first black President, Barack Obama.
White supremacy isn't always violent, at least not at the level of the individual. Some effects of white supremacy are more insidious, but also more widespread and common. Scientific studies on implicit biases show that white people view black people as intellectually inferior and more threatening, among other things.
Implicit biases help explain why, for example, black Americans have more difficulty in obtaining loans and getting jobs, even after all non-race variables are controlled for. Perhaps most relevant to today's anti-Muslim massacres in New Zealand is research showing that large proportions of white people in western societies tend to view Muslims and other brown immigrants as subhuman.
Another problem directly relevant to today's New Zealand massacres is media coverage. Western news media coverage of Muslims tends to be negative and highly stereotypical. Violent crimes carried out by Muslims are highlighted in reportage, while violent crimes perpetrated against Muslims are often de-emphasised or ignored.
One peer-reviewed quantitative analysis showed that acts of terrorism committed by Muslims receive 357 percent more news attention than acts of terrorism committed by non-Muslims. Additionally, the word "terrorism" is often ignored in the context of non-Muslim violence and used exclusively in news reports describing Muslim crimes.
Political elites and media coverage, then, are two factors helping to explain the largely negative perceptions of Muslims, black people, immigrants, and other minorities in contemporary Western societies. Today's shooters in New Zealand weren't born to hate Muslims or any other minority group. They were taught, just as all other white supremacist terrorists are taught, via bigoted discourses which have attained hegemonic status in western societies.
To this conspiracy theory, the failure to uphold cultural and racial supremacy is identified with the destruction of whites. The politics of the dummy spit underwrite the belief that acknowledging the existence of and respecting other cultures and ethnic groups is tantamount to the death of the Self. It reflects the mentality of the infantile ego, yet to discover the existence of others outside of the realm of the known, associated in practise with the ego.
It is not a little telling that this atrocity was carried out on the same day as the latest in a series of large-scale climate strikes by secondary students throughout Australia and the world. On the one side, those directly threatened by a very real crisis took active measures to do something positive and constructive. On the other, a small group of people preoccupied with the threat of the existence of others carried out a negative and destructive atrocity. The contrast could hardly be clearer.
What to make of the difference between the two? In an eponymous 2017 work, anthropologist Ghassan Hage enquires, is racism an environmental threat? Hage explicitly links the global rise in racism, demagoguery and bigotry, of which we can quite easily include this latest Christchurch massacre, with a reaction amongst elite groups to the social consequences of climate change.
In awakening a need for meaningful and profound social change amongst increasingly vast sectors of the world’s population, Hage argued, the climate crisis has come to present increasingly clear and present threats to elite privilege. It has done so in the main, he contended, through rude infringements of scientific fact and lived daily experience on the ideological mores that have upheld a world order of haves and have nots built on 500 years of colonialism.
Not the least of these was the Self vs. Other binary that had been at the core of what Edward Said called ‘Orientalism.’ Orientalism referred to the paternalistic frame of reference for subjugated peoples used to rationalise colonial extractivism as ‘civilising the savages’—a mentality with roots in the Roman propensity to view everyone not under their control as ‘barbarians,’ until they were ‘civilised’ (with all the attendant tributes for the imperial power).
Such formed the basis, Hage argued, for a tendency within advanced capitalism to oscillate between what he called‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ capitalism—the ‘savage’ being that of the racialised associated with the early period of colonialism. The ‘civilised,’ by contrast, was of the type commonly associated with modern industrial capitalism and the liberal democracies associated with it.
This oscillating tendency reflected in essence a scapegoating dynamic, deriving from the fact that capitalist development remained an ongoing process after it had reached an advanced stage. This was specially insofar as late capitalism is plagued by periodic crises driven by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, or by democratic challenges from below. This, Hage argued, drove the oscillation between ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ modes, as privileged elites returned to violence to rescue their privilege from the shortcomings of the system that upheld them, or from democracy, or from both.
Periodic returns to the ‘savage’ modalities and mentalities accompanying the conditions that produced its birth was encouraged then as a stopgap against crisis—in the manner documented by sociological research into moral panic and the documented tendency of elite-controlled corporate media to manufacture consent through scaremongering and the production of deviance. Herman and Chomsky produced a classic work exploring this phenomenon; more recent scholarship has identified moral panic in the process.
The Islamic bugbears and hobgoblins in particular were created as a result of the power of the corporate media to control the meaning of deviance and impose their definition on public discourse—not on the features of those so demonised. The global instability created by a world order in which the richest one percent owned half the world’s wealth and the richest ten percent owned ¾ of it could be blamed on the Islamic Other.
Which brings us back to this latest example of white supremacist terrorism in Christchurch. Nothing about this atrocity and the terrible loss of life is special, other than the fact that it took place on the same day as the latest round of climate strikes lead by secondary students. The contrast between the preoccupation with conspiracy and manufactured crisis and the very clear scientific understanding of climate crisis reflects with a unique conspicuousness the function of the former in dodging the reality of and constructing scapegoats for the latter.
If white protestants are feeling insecure, this has nothing to do with the social and environmental consequences of global economic modality built on the assumption that the world is an infinite resource and infinite garbage dump—it is the fault of those existing outside of the culturally hegemonic and supremacist monoculture for existing. Herein lies the scapegoating dynamic of savage capitalism, built on a white victim complex refusing to acknowledge any difference between respecting other cultures and the death of the Self.
As Ghassan Hage noted, the impetus for the scapegoating of savage capitalism and the white victim complex arises out of accumulation crisis, as the very real social, economic and environmental consequences of maintaining the world of haves and have-nots becomes harder and harder to sweep under the rug. As corporate-captured governments around the world continue to fail to act on climate change in prioritising profit over the planet, opposition from the young in particular can only ever grow.
In the face of this dire threat of democracy, the value of manufactured conspiracy theories alleging racial existential threats to be used as scapegoats increases accordingly—all the more so as the climate crisis continues to worsen, presenting an increasingly unavoidable existential threat to human society.
Atrocities like those perpetrated in Christchurch in the final analysis are driven by the impulse to blame the consequences of the social and economic modalities behind climate change on the victims and any other convenient scapegoats. They are driven by the impulse to reassert the fundamental modalities and mentalities that produced the interconnected crises of our age in the first place.
As long as they continue to be useful in suppressing the ultimate reality that there is no class privilege on a dead planet, prominent Islamophobes in the corporate media and politics will continue to promote the conspiracy theories driving the likes of Brendan Tarrant and Anders Brevik to deadly violence. In the end, the terror that these atrocities produce for the affected communities only reflects the racialised terror from which the Western-dominated world order was born, and whose consequences condemn us all to ecological Armageddon.
Not the least of these was the Self vs. Other binary that had been at the core of what Edward Said called ‘Orientalism.’ Orientalism referred to the paternalistic frame of reference for subjugated peoples used to rationalise colonial extractivism as ‘civilising the savages’—a mentality with roots in the Roman propensity to view everyone not under their control as ‘barbarians,’ until they were ‘civilised’ (with all the attendant tributes for the imperial power).
Such formed the basis, Hage argued, for a tendency within advanced capitalism to oscillate between what he called‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ capitalism—the ‘savage’ being that of the racialised associated with the early period of colonialism. The ‘civilised,’ by contrast, was of the type commonly associated with modern industrial capitalism and the liberal democracies associated with it.
This oscillating tendency reflected in essence a scapegoating dynamic, deriving from the fact that capitalist development remained an ongoing process after it had reached an advanced stage. This was specially insofar as late capitalism is plagued by periodic crises driven by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, or by democratic challenges from below. This, Hage argued, drove the oscillation between ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ modes, as privileged elites returned to violence to rescue their privilege from the shortcomings of the system that upheld them, or from democracy, or from both.
Periodic returns to the ‘savage’ modalities and mentalities accompanying the conditions that produced its birth was encouraged then as a stopgap against crisis—in the manner documented by sociological research into moral panic and the documented tendency of elite-controlled corporate media to manufacture consent through scaremongering and the production of deviance. Herman and Chomsky produced a classic work exploring this phenomenon; more recent scholarship has identified moral panic in the process.
The Islamic bugbears and hobgoblins in particular were created as a result of the power of the corporate media to control the meaning of deviance and impose their definition on public discourse—not on the features of those so demonised. The global instability created by a world order in which the richest one percent owned half the world’s wealth and the richest ten percent owned ¾ of it could be blamed on the Islamic Other.
Which brings us back to this latest example of white supremacist terrorism in Christchurch. Nothing about this atrocity and the terrible loss of life is special, other than the fact that it took place on the same day as the latest round of climate strikes lead by secondary students. The contrast between the preoccupation with conspiracy and manufactured crisis and the very clear scientific understanding of climate crisis reflects with a unique conspicuousness the function of the former in dodging the reality of and constructing scapegoats for the latter.
If white protestants are feeling insecure, this has nothing to do with the social and environmental consequences of global economic modality built on the assumption that the world is an infinite resource and infinite garbage dump—it is the fault of those existing outside of the culturally hegemonic and supremacist monoculture for existing. Herein lies the scapegoating dynamic of savage capitalism, built on a white victim complex refusing to acknowledge any difference between respecting other cultures and the death of the Self.
As Ghassan Hage noted, the impetus for the scapegoating of savage capitalism and the white victim complex arises out of accumulation crisis, as the very real social, economic and environmental consequences of maintaining the world of haves and have-nots becomes harder and harder to sweep under the rug. As corporate-captured governments around the world continue to fail to act on climate change in prioritising profit over the planet, opposition from the young in particular can only ever grow.
In the face of this dire threat of democracy, the value of manufactured conspiracy theories alleging racial existential threats to be used as scapegoats increases accordingly—all the more so as the climate crisis continues to worsen, presenting an increasingly unavoidable existential threat to human society.
Atrocities like those perpetrated in Christchurch in the final analysis are driven by the impulse to blame the consequences of the social and economic modalities behind climate change on the victims and any other convenient scapegoats. They are driven by the impulse to reassert the fundamental modalities and mentalities that produced the interconnected crises of our age in the first place.
As long as they continue to be useful in suppressing the ultimate reality that there is no class privilege on a dead planet, prominent Islamophobes in the corporate media and politics will continue to promote the conspiracy theories driving the likes of Brendan Tarrant and Anders Brevik to deadly violence. In the end, the terror that these atrocities produce for the affected communities only reflects the racialised terror from which the Western-dominated world order was born, and whose consequences condemn us all to ecological Armageddon.
Inside Story: How can online hate speech be stopped?
VENEZUELA
PALESTINA
I will never forget the Young American activist Rachel Corrie who was crushed to death under the blade of an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza 16 years ago, on March 16th. Her powerful legacy lives on in the hearts of many and in the action of the dozens of youngsters from all over the Western world that are still joining the International Solidarity Movement to help the Palestinians to cope with Israeli occupation.
The Higher National Commission of Great March of Return and Breaking the Siege has appealed to the solidarity movements, civil society organizations and all the world’s free and human rights advocates to declare Saturday, March 30, the forty-third anniversary of Palestinian Land Day, the first anniversary of the launch of the GMR a day of international solidarity with the demands of the Palestinian people to break the siege, return and Freedom.
The Commission called for the implementation of various solidarity activities, especially demonstrations and festivals in capitals and major cities in all countries of the world to demand the breaking of the immoral and illegal siege on the Gaza Strip and to affirm the right of the Palestinian people to freedom and return to the homes they were forcibly displaced from.
https://youtu.be/rpFSrr_zCGk
Following Israel's expulsion of the TIPH observer group from Hebron last month, a group of Palestinian activists from the city formed their own team of observers to fill in the gaps. Issa Amro and his team of observers head out every Morning to the Tel Rumeid neighborhood in Hebron's Old City and stand watch as children make their way to school. The little ones must pass through several checkpoints monitored by armed soldiers, and streets that are patrolled by violent settlers. Since they began their work, Amro's team have been given more than 10 military orders to stop work and have been attacked by settlers several times.
Since TIPHJ was expelled, the situation in Hebron has gotten a lot worse. Mondoweiss reporters followed the team around one morning and in the span of just half an hour, the group, including the cameraman, were attacked and harassed by Israeli settlers, while one international activist who was filming the altercation was arrested by police.
Check it out.
The Higher National Commission of Great March of Return and Breaking the Siege has appealed to the solidarity movements, civil society organizations and all the world’s free and human rights advocates to declare Saturday, March 30, the forty-third anniversary of Palestinian Land Day, the first anniversary of the launch of the GMR a day of international solidarity with the demands of the Palestinian people to break the siege, return and Freedom.
The Commission called for the implementation of various solidarity activities, especially demonstrations and festivals in capitals and major cities in all countries of the world to demand the breaking of the immoral and illegal siege on the Gaza Strip and to affirm the right of the Palestinian people to freedom and return to the homes they were forcibly displaced from.
Mondoweiss: The March of Return
Daily Life Occupation
Footage of Israeli soldiers violently beating and insulting a Palestinian father and son during an arrest in January was released on Tuesday by an Israeli district court, according to Haaretz. In the video, filmed by one soldier, four soldiers from the ultra-Orthodox Netzah Yehuda battalion are seen repeatedly beating the blindfolded and handcuffed father and son over the head, kicking them, and hitting them with their weapons. The soldiers can be heard laughing and mocking the pair, saying “it’s a celebration” and “say hello” to the camera.https://youtu.be/rpFSrr_zCGk
Following Israel's expulsion of the TIPH observer group from Hebron last month, a group of Palestinian activists from the city formed their own team of observers to fill in the gaps. Issa Amro and his team of observers head out every Morning to the Tel Rumeid neighborhood in Hebron's Old City and stand watch as children make their way to school. The little ones must pass through several checkpoints monitored by armed soldiers, and streets that are patrolled by violent settlers. Since they began their work, Amro's team have been given more than 10 military orders to stop work and have been attacked by settlers several times.
Since TIPHJ was expelled, the situation in Hebron has gotten a lot worse. Mondoweiss reporters followed the team around one morning and in the span of just half an hour, the group, including the cameraman, were attacked and harassed by Israeli settlers, while one international activist who was filming the altercation was arrested by police.
Check it out.
A Semana Anual do Apartheid israelense começa nesta segunda-feira na Europa e continuará mundo afora até o dia 8 de abril.
Ative um comitê em sua cidade, escola, universidade.
Para organizar as manifestações político-culturais, entre em contato com o BDS Brasil (https://bdsmovement.net/pt) ou acesse diretamente o link internacional apartheidweek.org e organize as atividades de solidariedade com o povo palestino há 71 anos ocupado.
O tema deste ano é "Parem de armar o Colonialismo".
E não se esqueça de checar a origem dos produtos que consome para boicotar Israel, inclusive Hewlett Packard.
The 15th Annual Israeli Apartheid Week of actions will take place all around the world from March 18th to April 8th 2019 under the theme “Stop Arming Colonialism”.
Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is an international series of events that seeks to raise awareness about Israel’s apartheid regime over the Palestinian people and build support for the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. It now takes place in over 200 cities across the world, where events such as lectures, film screenings, direct action, cultural performances, postering, among many more help in grassroots organizing for effective solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle.
Israel is able to maintain its illegal occupation and apartheid regime over Palestinians partly due to its arms sales and the military support it receives from governments across the world. The United States alone is the single largest supplier of arms and military aid to Israel, followed by European states. These directly sustain Israel’s oppression and human rights violations.
In the Global South, Israel has been known to supply weapons to genocidal regimes in Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and elsewhere. Presently, Israel is a major arms exporter to right-wing, authoritarian regimes from Brazil to India, the Philippines and beyond. These weapons are promoted as ‘field-tested’, which means they have been used to kill or injure Palestinians. In fact, Israel is already promoting the technology it has used to repress the Great March of Return in Gaza calling for the right of refugees to return home and an end to the siege. These arms deals finance Israel’s apartheid regime and its illegal occupation while simultaneously deepening militarization and persecution of people’s movements and oppressed communities in countries where they are bought.
In the Global South, Israel has been known to supply weapons to genocidal regimes in Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and elsewhere. Presently, Israel is a major arms exporter to right-wing, authoritarian regimes from Brazil to India, the Philippines and beyond. These weapons are promoted as ‘field-tested’, which means they have been used to kill or injure Palestinians. In fact, Israel is already promoting the technology it has used to repress the Great March of Return in Gaza calling for the right of refugees to return home and an end to the siege. These arms deals finance Israel’s apartheid regime and its illegal occupation while simultaneously deepening militarization and persecution of people’s movements and oppressed communities in countries where they are bought.
The Palestinian-led BDS movement has reiterated the demand for a military embargo on Israel in the light of Israel’s violent repression of the Great March of Return. International human rights organizations such as Amnesty International have also responded to the Israeli massacre in Gaza with this demand. The UK Labour Party, in its conference in September 2018, passed a motion condemning Israel’s killing of Palestinian protesters in Gaza and called for a freeze of arms sales to Israel.
Ending arms trade, military aid and cooperation with Israel will undercut financial and military support for its regime of apartheid, settler-colonialism and illegal occupation. It will also end the flow of Israeli weapons and security technology and techniques to governments that suppress resistance of their own citizens, people’s movements and communities against policies that deprive them of fundamental rights, including the right to the natural resources of their country.
A military embargo on Israel is a measure for freedom and justice of Palestinians and oppressed peoples in many parts of the world. It can successfully be achieved with massive grassroots efforts, similar to the sustained global mobilization that eventually compelled the United Nations to impose a binding international military embargo against South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Israeli Apartheid Week 2019 will be an important platform for building the campaign for a military embargo on Israel. We invite progressive groups to organize events on their campuses and in their cities to popularize and build momentum in this direction.
If you would like to organize and be part of Israeli Apartheid Week 2019 on your campus or in your city, check out what events are already planned at apartheidweek.org, find us on Facebook and Twitter, register onlinehttp://apartheidweek.org/organise/ and get in touch with IAW coordinators in your region.
AN OPEN LETTER FROM ROGER WATERS TO CONAN OSIRIS AND THE OTHER 41 FINALISTS FOR THE EUROVISION SONG CONTEST.
A few days ago, I wrote a private letter to a young talented Portuguese singer, Conan Osiris. He had just won the right to represent Portugal in the Eurovision song contest final, and was reported as saying he wasn’t sure if he would go to Tel Aviv or not. I listened to his song, and then got a translation of the lyrics it was about using his cell phone to ask questions about life and death and love. It was quite deep.
I was told by friends that Conan Osiris might join the vast network of artists who are heeding the Palestinian call to boycott Eurovision in apartheid Tel Aviv. So I wrote and suggested to him that here he had an opportunity to speak up for life over death and also for human rights over human wrongs. How? By standing shoulder to shoulder, with his oppressed brothers and sisters in Palestine. He could show solidarity with the 189 un-armed protestors shot to death by Israel’s snipers in Gaza last year alone, including at least 35 children.
But how could our brother Conan stand up? By refusing to join the cultural whitewash of what a recent UN report calls Israel’s war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, by refraining from providing his art to art-wash Israel’s systematic ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian communities to expand and maintain its apartheid state.
Conan can refuse to perform in front of the segregated audience in Tel Aviv at the Eurovision song contest finals this coming May.
In my letter I explained that Eurovision could be a tipping point, I appealed to Conan to stand up and be counted. Sadly, until now, there is no reply from Conan.
There is news though, reliable sources tell me that young Conan has been personally approached and persuaded to go to the finals by an organization called Creative Community for Peace (CCfP).
Ahhhh! For anyone who doesn’t know, CCfP has been exposed as an offshoot of the far-right Israeli government backed propaganda organizations “Stand With Us” and “The Israel Emergency Fund”. It has nothing to do with creativity, community or peace. It’s a front for Israeli apartheid and military occupation. See this link from Jewish Voice for Peace, a fast-growing, creative organization that really does promote community and peace based on human rights and justice for all.
https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/ccpfis…/
The Eurovision finals are two months away. Conan, I know how “persuasive” CCfP and the rest of the Israeli lobby machine can be. They know exactly how to employ a mix of bullying, threats and promises to reach their goals. Good luck brother, you are not alone. There are 42 finalists, among them we will find the one. The one who has enough love in their heart to stand up and be counted. To say, “I believe in universal human and civil rights and protection under the law for all my brothers and sisters all over the world irrespective of ethnicity, nationality or religion”. “I will not cross the Palestinian picket line to perform in apartheid Tel Aviv until all my brothers and sisters from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea have equal rights under the law.” The one who will be remembered for standing on the right side of history, standing for love, true peace and justice.
When I was young my mother always used to say to me, “There is always a right thing to do, just do it.”
Be the one, Conan. Just do it.
Are you the one?
A few days ago, I wrote a private letter to a young talented Portuguese singer, Conan Osiris. He had just won the right to represent Portugal in the Eurovision song contest final, and was reported as saying he wasn’t sure if he would go to Tel Aviv or not. I listened to his song, and then got a translation of the lyrics it was about using his cell phone to ask questions about life and death and love. It was quite deep.
I was told by friends that Conan Osiris might join the vast network of artists who are heeding the Palestinian call to boycott Eurovision in apartheid Tel Aviv. So I wrote and suggested to him that here he had an opportunity to speak up for life over death and also for human rights over human wrongs. How? By standing shoulder to shoulder, with his oppressed brothers and sisters in Palestine. He could show solidarity with the 189 un-armed protestors shot to death by Israel’s snipers in Gaza last year alone, including at least 35 children.
But how could our brother Conan stand up? By refusing to join the cultural whitewash of what a recent UN report calls Israel’s war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, by refraining from providing his art to art-wash Israel’s systematic ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian communities to expand and maintain its apartheid state.
Conan can refuse to perform in front of the segregated audience in Tel Aviv at the Eurovision song contest finals this coming May.
In my letter I explained that Eurovision could be a tipping point, I appealed to Conan to stand up and be counted. Sadly, until now, there is no reply from Conan.
There is news though, reliable sources tell me that young Conan has been personally approached and persuaded to go to the finals by an organization called Creative Community for Peace (CCfP).
Ahhhh! For anyone who doesn’t know, CCfP has been exposed as an offshoot of the far-right Israeli government backed propaganda organizations “Stand With Us” and “The Israel Emergency Fund”. It has nothing to do with creativity, community or peace. It’s a front for Israeli apartheid and military occupation. See this link from Jewish Voice for Peace, a fast-growing, creative organization that really does promote community and peace based on human rights and justice for all.
https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/ccpfis…/
The Eurovision finals are two months away. Conan, I know how “persuasive” CCfP and the rest of the Israeli lobby machine can be. They know exactly how to employ a mix of bullying, threats and promises to reach their goals. Good luck brother, you are not alone. There are 42 finalists, among them we will find the one. The one who has enough love in their heart to stand up and be counted. To say, “I believe in universal human and civil rights and protection under the law for all my brothers and sisters all over the world irrespective of ethnicity, nationality or religion”. “I will not cross the Palestinian picket line to perform in apartheid Tel Aviv until all my brothers and sisters from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea have equal rights under the law.” The one who will be remembered for standing on the right side of history, standing for love, true peace and justice.
When I was young my mother always used to say to me, “There is always a right thing to do, just do it.”
Be the one, Conan. Just do it.
Love,
Roger
BRASIL
AOS FATOS:Todas as declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas
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