Gareth Smith (NSW) writes to the Byron Echo re Israeli singeer Moshe Ben Ari’s concert 30Mar12 March 30, 2012

Last night at the Mullumbimby Civic Hall about 8 of us bore witness before a large crowd attending Israeli singer Mosh Ben Ari’s concert. We highlighted the suffering of the Palestinian people on banners and flew Palestinian flags. Mosh is renowned for his songs of peace, love and harmony but he cannot be considered a serious challenge to the Zionist narrative or else his Australian tour would not be advertised on the websites of the Israeli embassy and the Zionist Foundation of Australia. He would be anathema, much like Russian artist Oleg Yanushevsky who was so on the nose of the Russian establishment that he sought political asylum in Britain.

Mosh’s music serves the Zionist cause well because it helps deodorise Israel’s rotten, illegal practices. Jonathon Cook writes: “…the last remnants of Palestine are being annexed to Israel while its native inhabitants are concentrated into holding pens in preparation for their final ethnic cleansing, to make way for Jewish settlers; and that, faced with the concerted efforts of the Zionist lobby, the Western media-and human rights groups-barely dare mention these obvious developments…. the erasure of the Palestinian homeland and the concealment of this fact from the wider public are crucial to Israel and its supporters because they are intimately tied to Israel’s continuing legitimacy as a Jewish state”.(Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair, Zed Books, 2010).

Our witness was no doubt offensive to some but we make no apologies for standing up for the victim rather than the Israeli colonialist.


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