I so hope this gets to number 1, not that I care, but just to make a point. At last someone in the music bizness has the bottle to make a strong stand. I have been disgusted with the deafening silence. Ufff..
When people wonder what you would have done in World War 2, it’s whatever you are doing right now.
https://metro.co.uk/2024/05/07/macklemore-floors-fans-moving-pro-palestine-song-hinds-hall-20792968/
Exactly.
The people, they won’t leave
What is threatenin’ about divesting and wantin’ peace?
The problem isn’t the protests, it’s what they’re protesting
It goes against what our country is funding
Block the barricade until Palestine is free
Block the barricade until Palestine is free
When I was seven, I learned a lesson from Cube and Eazy-E
What was it again? Oh, yeah, fuck the police
Actors in badges protecting property
And a system that was designed by white supremacy
But the people are in the streets
You can pay off Meta, you can’t pay off me
Politicians who serve by any means
AIPAC, CUFI, and all the companies
You see, we sell fear around the land of the free
But this generation here is about to cut the strings
You can ban TikTok, take us out the algorithm
But it’s too late, we’ve seen the truth, we bear witness
Seen the rubble, the buildings, the mothers and the children
And all the men that you murdered, and then we see how you spin it
Who gets the right to defend and who gets the right of resistance
Has always been about dollars and the color of your pigment, but
White supremacy is finally on blast
Screamin’ Free Palestine till they’re home at last
We see the lies in ’em
Claimin’ it’s antisemitic to be anti-Zionist
I’ve seen Jewish brothers and sisters out there and ridin’ in
Solidarity and screamin’ “Free Palestine” with them
Organizin’, unlearnin’ and finally cuttin’ ties with
A state that’s gotta rely on an apartheid system
To uphold an occupyin’ violent
History been repeating for the last seventy-five
The Nakba never ended, the colonizer lied
If students in tents posted on the lawn
Occupyin’ the quad is really against the law
And a reason to call in the police and their squad
Where does genocide land in your definition, huh?
Destroyin’ every college in Gaza and every mosque
Pushin’ everyone into Rafah and droppin’ bombs
The blood is on your hands, Biden, we can see it all
And fuck no, I’m not votin’ for you in the fall
Undecided
You can’t twist the truth, the people out here united
Never be defeated when freedom’s on the horizon
Yet the music industry’s quiet, complicit in their platform of silence
What happened to the artist? What d’you got to say?
If I was on a label, you could drop me today
I’d be fine with it ’cause the heart fed my page
I want a ceasefire, fuck a response from Drake
What you willin’ to risk? What you willin’ to give?
What if you were in Gaza? What if those were your kids?
If the West was pretendin’ that you didn’t exist
You’d want the world to stand up and the students finally did, let’s get it
No one wins this war.
Hamas seem to be doing OK.
@Contraryarticle! Where have you been? I’ve missed you.
Had other shit going on Tiggs, which meant I haven’t really had the time, or the heart to be listening to music, as it hasn’t been my priority. I don’t know if that will change anytime soon. I have been horrified & disgusted at what has been allowed to continue in the middle east over the last seven months, & really over the last seventy + years. I seem to have a different take to it than most here, as I expected. As a mom, & a grandma, it rips my heart to see kids suffer in the way they have. Coming from a country which has had its own battles in gaining it’s freedom from an oppressive colonial power I sympathise with the Palestinians plight.
Oops! I am obviously very out of touch with posting on here anymore as I didn’t meant to yet. Like Macklemore I was relatively ignorant of the goings on in Israel but the more I have seen & read I am astounded that such a right wing militaristic apartheid state is allowed to operate with such impunity. We put an end to apartheid in South Africa, started off by the Dunnes Stores girls boycotting their products, & SA was nowhere near as brutal as Israel has been. I’d never hear of clean roads (Jewish only roads) & dirty roads (shared roads). Crazy. Jewish safety shouldn’t rely on Palestinian oppression. And bombing your way to peace, well, is like f**king your way to virginity, as the saying goes. I don’t know. It’s just so terribly sad, but complacency is enablement, so I’m out marching, boycotting, signing petitions & donating to things I think might help. I just can’t do nothing. But that’s just my take. So be it.
I don’t think you have to be a mom (or a grandmother) to find the daily reports and images of children being orphaned, maimed or killed utterly heartbreaking. You just have to be human.
Yet some people, somehow, seem ok with it. I saw a couple of days ago Gary Lineker saying he cries regularly at seeing such reports. And then the sick, nasty side of Twitter managed to interpret this as him not caring about what Hamas did on October 7th.
What Hamas did was brutal and inhuman. What Israel is doing is brutal and inhuman.
@Contraryarticle, I hope you find the heart for music again soon.
What Hamas did was absolutely brutal and inhuman. I don’t want to belittle the atrocities of October 7th in any way (there’s a powerful documentary onYouTube called Screams Before The Silence that details just how horrific those atrocities were.) But the reality is, 1,139 people were killed on that day (including 36 children and 373 members of the security forces) and about 250 people were kidnapped.
An estimated 14,000 Palestinian children have been killed since that day and over 12,000 injured.
14,000 children.
That film is nothing but propaganda & lies. Please don’t believe anything you see in that.
Electronic Intifada! I was recently criticised rather disparagingly by an AWer for getting my information from Electronic Intifada, even though I’d never even heard of it. I will watch that video later today, though to be honest I’m not really interested in proving or disproving what happened on October 7th. As the famous quote goes, “the first casualty of war is truth” and it’s hard to know with any certainty what is true and what is propaganda. But like most people around the world, I just want the mass slaughter of innocent children to stop.
I’m with you on that Gary. I’m not a Hamas sympathiser by any means. All life is sacred, & one life is not worth more than another no matter what religious or ethnic background. I feel like we are living in an actual Hunger Games situation right now where half the world is distracted by glitz of Met balls & Eurovisions while the other half are being slaughtered behind a wall. Disgusting.
Neither Hamas nor this Israeli government believe all life is sacred. How can you persuade two sets of murderous thugs, who love violence and death, to embrace peace?
The first step is to stop arms, of course. But, Netanyahu has said they will fight with their fingernails and I believe him.
Attempting to include Hamas in civilised negotiations some years ago, as the British did with the IRA, may well have been the most prudent course.
Guilty as charged about being temporarily distracted from the horrors of the real world by that preposterous pop party in Malmö. I was very grateful for a little escapism but of course Israel’s presence made forgetting the real world rather difficult, On a positive note, Ukraine’s song came third and got one of the highest votes from the viewing public. A clear message to their countrymen that Europe is still firmly behind them. It was a good song too!
Where is the estimated figure from?
UNICEF
Who rely on the estimates of the local Palestinian Health Authorities.
However, it’s telling that Israel barely disputes the figures. It’s as though they tacitly accept them as inevitable.
I see the figures have now been disputed by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, who claim the number of children killed, based on documented evidence, is 7,797 children (plus 4,959 women, 1,924 elderly, and 10,006 men). Still completely unnacceptable and heartbreaking.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/13/middleeast/death-toll-gaza-fatalities-un-intl-latam/index.html
Hamas is a death cult. Bibi is a bastard. Between the two, they are creating another generation of death cultists. Who is winning? The reaper is, that’s who.
Bibi is whipping up righteous hatred for Israel, both internationally and, most of all, among Palestinians. Which presumably suits Hamas just fine.
Indeed.
Killed and/or kidnapped some 1,500 Israelis, and in doing so provoked Bonkers Benji into a genocidal retaliation that has killed Palestinians in the tens of thousands and resulted in his and his country’s becoming global pariahs.
Best of all their actions have created a whole new generation of members
and sowed the seeds of years and years more needless slaughter.
Not bad for a couple of hours work on an early autumn afternoon
Hamas’s (and Iran) objective was to disrupt the progress Israel had been making in normalising relations with their Arab neighbours. The fact that there is enormous collateral damage for their own people is irrelevant to them. Netanyahu walked straight into it, partly for his own reasons too of course as politicians in trouble quite like wars.
Hamas seem to have been studying the MO of the secarii in Jewish history. Ironic doesn’t come close.
Great to have you back @Contraryartícle.
Hats off to Macklemore for writing a much-needed protest song.
Excellent comments from Twang, Jaygee, Gary and Vulpes.
Hamas have rocketed the Palestine question right to the top of the international agenda and begun a rift between Israel and the US. But at what a horrific cost to the people that they are supposedly fighting for!
Both sides in this shitshow are in love with victimhood.
There’s a lot of social programming to be overcome before they can get along with each other.
I look forward to seeing Netanyahu out of office and in the clink. If he doesn’t do a last-minute flit to the USA, that is.
On related theme I watched David Baddiel’s documentary the other day “Jews don’t count”. Thought provoking. Channel 4 stream.
I read the book and wrote a typically crap review of it here on the AW. It’s an interesting and thought provoking read (his book, not my review). I used to dislike Baddiel, found him a racist promoter of thoroughly obnoxious “lad culture”. Then I started to quite like him and find him interesting as he became more serious and politically outspoken. But now I’ve gone off him again as he’s become increasingly pushed as some sort of intellectual spokesperson. Not entirely his fault, I suppose, but he does come across as obsessive and rather self-aggrandizing.
IIRC he declares at the start of the book that he’s not at all interested in Israel or Palestine.
Somehow I missed your review and the thread Gary – both very interesting.
Maybe a remix could work?
https://rave.dj/YBFZcinYfiHSPw
This David Rovics song was on the Andy Kershaw podcast last December – that’s nearly six months ago. It’s like he used a crystal ball to write the lyric.
Netanyahu is a murderous bastard who has made a bed that the whole of the Israeli population have to lie in – many of them reluctantly. He should not be a leader of this country. and this current conflict will eventually see his demise either before or after any planned attack on Rafah.
One day there will have to be a two state solution but we are a very long way from that.
In the meantime more innocents get slaughtered and more future terrorists are created.
Dire situation.
Well said. I reject any moral equivalency between Israel and the Palestinians. Hamas is a morbid symptom of the dehumanisation of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israeli fascism and does not represent the Palestinians as a whole.
Hamas was elected by a tiny fraction of the Palestinian people the best part of two decades ago. There are credible claims also that Israel supported the original breaking away of Hamas from the rest of the PLO on the grounds that it would weaken the latter, and that Hamas would turn out to be a purely religious organisation rather than the militant PLO (which was not a religious party as such). One of the many ironies of this situation …
Meanwhile, everyone seems to have forgotten all about the terrible atrocities that have been going on in Ukraine these last two-plus years.
Take Stuart Andrew, the Sports Minister in our joke of a government. The amnesia he’s been afflicted with is so serious he’s just been outed for writing to the IOC to quietly reverse our govt’s former “no Russian involvement in the Paris Olympics” stance.
Bit of a slap in the face for the families of the 400 Ukrainian athletes Putin has killed these last two years.
On the plus side, the UK may well get to host a BMX or Breakdancing event so there’s that
Great piece by Matthew Syed about this very issue in this morning’s Sunday Times
There were no protests about Syria or Libya either. Because they aren’t Israel, some might say.