Tuesday, April 15, 2008

HUGGABLE FLUFFY PALESTINIAN CULTURAL EVENT

Further to Hatefest 2008, which will be celebrated this May tenth in the civic center in San Francisco, a little digging has turned up some interesting stuff.

The event is being organized by Al-Awda (The Palestine Right to Return Coalition), in order to co-opt the unaffiliated and ignorant, especially among the young. In that uncommendable goal they are being helped by volunteers from several organizations, many of which include Jews with serious issues.
[See some of my previous posts for further data, or search on the net for Bay Area Women in Black, Break the Siege, Brit Tzedek ve Shalom, International Jewish Solidarity Network, Jewish Voice for Peace, Peace and Justice, SJME - Students for Justice in the Middle East,
SJP - Students for Justice in Palestine (UC Berkeley). Some of these folks are more open about collusion than others, almost all of them support Hamas and Hezbollah.]



Tentative list of artists:
Arab Summit: Exentrik, Narcicyst, Omar Offendum, Ragtop
Dam: Abeer–Palestinian Hip-Hop crew from Lid (Israeli-Arabs turned militant pro-terrorists who endorse suicide bombing)
Dead Prez
http://www.deadprez.com/ (militant black revolutionary gangsta rappers)
Fred Wreck
http://www.fredwreck.com
Ras Ceylon
http://www.emmoworks.com/rasceylon.html

There will also be performances by Boots Riley, NaR, Mamaz, Politikal Heat, Rithmatik & Patriarch, and DJ Emancipacion.

[I am terminally unhip - Who are these people?]


The day-long "Palestine, Peace and Solidarity Festival" will be free to all; teenagers (the target audience) are not known for excess cash, and if they have any, the organizers hope that they will donate it to the cause or use it to shop at the concessions.

--- --- --- --- ---

NOTE: To be involved with Al Awda, one must agree to their points of unity, which include:
* An end to all US political, military and economic aid to Israel.
* The divestment of all public and private entities from all Israeli corporations and American corporations with subsidiaries operating within Israel.
* An end to the investment of Labor Union members' pension funds in Israel.
* The boycott of all Israeli products.
* The right to return for all Palestinian refugees to their original towns, villages and lands with compensation for sixty years of discrimination in lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and elsewhere.


Al-Awda also has many other demands - a number of them have been screamed at us in demonstrations - as well as several resonant rhetorical points (example: "Falastin balad'na w'al yahud qalab'na!" - 'Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs'), and I'm certain that their message will appeal to hip-hop fans of all ages.

Just because a middle-aged white person such as my self hasn't heard of any of the performers and utterly despises Al-Awda and everything they stand for doesn't mean that they aren't mainstream in the Bay Area.

3 comments:

Hazem said...

Oh shucks, those crazy Palestinians are organizing again... Watch out! I mean seriously, where do they get the audacity to act like victims of some brutally oppressive colonialist enterprise? It's just Israel after all...

Thanks for exposing your arrogance and stupidity to the world.

The back of the hill said...

My dear Hazem,

How remarkable that there is no spelling error in your comment.

Educated over here, I presume?

------------

But seriously, dude, I like the use of the word 'audacity'. I find it odd, though - Palestinians and fellow-travelers over here are in no position to pretend victimhood. Now, for the population of Gaza, who perforce must act as shields for terrorists (though clearly they do not wish to do so), and for the occupants of the camps, who have suffered from the bigotry and apartheid mentality of their fellow Arabs and the United Nations for sixty long years, victimhood is an appropriate term - when are the Arab nations going to treat their people with the same consideration shown by Israel to the Mizrahim dispossessed and chased out of their homes in Egypt, Tunis, Libya, Morocco, Algiers, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon? The Palestinians have been the recipient of so much more funding from the UN, Arab dictatorships, and wussy Europeans that it is most marvelous that they have accomplished so little, nor achieved any reasonable goals.

But they cannot be blamed - even though the PLO was founded by the Egyptians and funded with the money taken from expelled Jews (the Alexandrian and Cairene Jewish communities had been in existence since BEFORE Egypt became part of the Arab world), alas, the purse-strings of the Palestinian enterprise have always been held by deeply corrupt opportunists.

Stand up, Hazem, and take back what is yours: a voice in your own affairs, control over the funding given so generously to the co-opted sons of absentee landlords and mukhtars, and freedom to become citizens in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan..... where the vast majority of the Palestinians were born, and were they will live and die.

The back of the hill said...

Oh, and for crapsake, stop listening to rap and hip-hop.

The Arab world has such a rich musical heritage that you have no need, utterly no need, to listen to iggerunt chanting in jargon.

Or, for something truly dynamite, how about some qawwali singing? I am particularly partial to the Sabri Brothers...... truly great stuff.

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