“Palestine is in crisis. Today Palestinians face daily human rights abuse and live in crushing poverty in refugee camps and under Israeli Occupation.
In response to this injustice, a group of international musicians are releasing the song Freedom for Palestine by OneWorld.”
Featuring
Maxi Jazz (Faithless), Dave Randall (Slovo/Faithless), LSK, the Durban Gospel Choir, members of the London Community Gospel Choir, Jamie Catto (1 Giant Leap), Harry Collier (Kubb), Andrea Britton, Sudha (Faithless), Andy Treacy (Faithless / Moby / Groove Armada), Attab Haddad, Joelle Barker and Tony Reed.
Music video features artists on track in addition to comedian Mark Thomas, rapper Lowkey and poet Michael Rosen.
Song written and produced by Dave Randall. Video produced by Andy Marlow. Filming by Alex Forster, Andy Marlow & Henna Malik (UK), Dave Randall (UK & West Bank), Jen Marlowe (Gaza) and Amehlo Video Productions (SA). Animation by the Moth Collective.
A new animated film released by Gisha challenges the commonly held belief that Israel no longer exercises control over Gaza and does not bear responsibility for what goes on there. The opening of the Rafah Crossing is a welcome improvement in Gaza residents’ access to the outside world. However, it does not detract from Israel’s obligation to allow regular travel between Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinian territory shares a single economy, a single education system, a single healthcare system and countless familial, cultural and social ties.
Stunningly hilarious take on an enormously nauseating theme!
Obamation
“This track is not an attack upon the American people
It is an attack upon the system within which they live
Since 1945 the united states has attempted to
Overthrow more than 50 foreign governments
In the process the us has caused the end of life
For several million people, and condemned many millions
More to a live of agony and despair
[Verse 1]
The strength of your dreamin
Prevents you from reason
The American dream
Only makes sense if you’re sleepin
Its just a cruel fantasy
Their politics took my voice away
But their music gave it back to me
The land where the lumpen are consumed by consumption
Killing themselves to shovel down food and abundance
I guess a rapper from Britain is a rare voice
America is capitalism on steroids
Natives kept in casinos and reservations
Displaced slaves never given reparations
Take everything from Native Americans
And wonder why I call it the racist experiment
Afraid of your melanin
The same as it’s ever been
That aint gonna change
With the race of the president
I see imperialism under your skin tone
You could call it Christopher Columbus syndrome
[Chorus 2x]
Is it Obama’s nation or an abomination?
Is it Obama’s nation or an abomination?
Is it Obama’s nation or an abomination?
Doesn’t make any difference when they bomb your nation
O! Say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming
[Verse 2]
The worlds entertainer
The worlds devastator
From Venezuela
To Mesopotamia
Your cameras lie
Cause they have to hide the savage crimes
Committed on leaders that happen
To try and nationalize
Eating competitions while the worlds been starvin
Beat up communism with the help of bin-laden
Where would your war of terror be without that man
Every day you create more Nidal Hassans
Kill a man from the military, you’re a weirdo
But kill a bloke from the Middle East you’re a hero
Your country is causing screams that are never reaching ear holes
America inflicted a million ground zeros
Follow the dollar and swallow your humanity
Soldiers committing savagery you never even have to see
Those mad at me, writing in emails angrily
Im not anti-America, America is anti-me
[Chorus 2x]
Is it Obama’s nation or an abomination?
Is it Obama’s nation or an abomination?
Is it Obama’s nation or an abomination?
Doesn’t make any difference when they bomb your nation
And the rocket’s red glare,
The bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there,
O! Does that star spangled banner yet wave
O’er land of the free and the home of the brave
[Verse 3]
I don’t care if him and Cheney are long lost relations
What matters more is the policies I lost my patience
Stop debating bringing race into conversation
Occupation and cooperation equals profit makin
Its over – people wake up from the dream now
Nobel peace prize, jay z on speed dial
Its the substance within, not the color of your skin
Are you the puppeteer or the puppet on the string
So many believe that they was instantly gonna change
There was still Dennis Ross, Brzezinski And Robert Gates
What happened to Chas freeman (AIPAC),
What happened to Tristan Anderson its a machine that keeps that man breathing
I have the heart to say what all the other rappers aren’t
Words like Iraq, Palestine – Afghanistan
The wars on, and you morons were all wrong
I call Obama a bomber Cause those are your bombs”
– Lowkey
Palestine / Israel Links
Techno music scene dives into the BDS debate : DJ Ewan Pearson supports BDS wholeheartedly : ‘It is not about me deciding whether I should go to Israel or not, but rather whether I am going to listen to the wishes of the Palestinian people at a time when not nearly enough others are doing so.’
I have always quietly turned gigs in Israel down, appalled by the accounts I’ve read of the Occupation, the mistreatment of its Palestinian population and recently the blockade on Gaza. The systematic manner in which one set of citizens is being de-humanised parallels the South African Apartheid era when I first heard music and political protest linked and became aware of musicians refusing to travel in order to draw attention to a political situation.
But music transcends politics doesn’t it? Not at all. If music is of and about the world it has to engage it. Musicians are not ambassadors with carte blanche to go where we like as we’re spreading an implicit message of love. Too damn easy. Sometimes we have to say tougher and less palatable stuff, in this case that the actions of a purportedly democratic government in the name of a decent people are doing them massive harm, and the rest of us too as we sit idly by.
Art and politics at their best are about imagining yourself in someone else’s place, trying to feel what someone in quite different circumstances is experiencing. This is where solidarity comes from. I have more in common with a left-leaning cosmopolitan raver in Tel Aviv than a Palestinian in the occupied territories, but to go there and DJ is to say the status quo is fine, that it’s OK to forget about what’s happening for a moment. To paraphrase Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, it’s buying an alcoholic friend a bottle of scotch when you should be phoning AA.
House music’s most famous political message – that one day the oppressed will be emancipated and find the Promised Land – is derived from the Torah, from the laments of Jews exiled in Egypt and Babylon. Today it seems more appropriate to the plight of their Palestinian brothers and sisters. Until that’s no longer the case, I have to write stuff like this over playing records, smiling and telling everyone “It’s Alright”.
“We see culture as a propaganda tool of the first rank, and… do not differentiate between propaganda and culture” – Nissim Ben-Sheetrit, spokesperson of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, 2005
UN General Assembly president Joseph Deiss had said that to be recognized at the UN, a Palestinian state will need the support of all five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council.
Professor Richard D. Wolff: This four part course provides a working foundation in the core concepts of Marxian economic theory – necessary and surplus labor, labor power, surplus value, exploitation, capital accumulation, distributions of the surplus, capitalist crises, and the differences between capitalist and other class structures. In addition, these core concepts will be systematically used to understand current social problems (including political and cultural as well as economic problems). The goal is to enable students to apply Marxian economics in their own efforts to analyze society and to strategize politically today.
For many Palestinians, Lifta is a symbol of the Nakba, literally the “catastrophe”, of 1948 in which 700,000 people were dispossessed. It embodies their longing for their land, and their bitterness at their continued refugee status. It is, wrote Palestinian author Ghada Karmi in a letter to the Los Angeles Times, “a physical memory of injustice and survival”.
Targeting of children is nothing new in West Bank villages like Nabi Saleh and Bil’in. This afternoon, Israeli police raided the house of 8 year-old Ali Siyam in the Occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.
…
Siyam’s arrest comes days after Israeli soldiers broke the arm of a 9-year-old Palestinian child in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. Soldiers, in violation of Israeli army rules of conduct, fired a tear gas canister directly at the child from a range of ten meters. Another 14 year old child was injured from a tear gas canister before the demonstration was over.
In its last open letter to Cameron, sent two weeks ago, Stop the JNF characterized the JNF’s British Park in Israel as one that was planted “in order to cover over the remains of the Palestinian villages of Ajjur and Zakariyya, destroyed in 1948, and to prevent the original population and their descendants from returning.”
Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Sarah Colborne said in a statement that Cameron’s decision “reflects the fact that it is now impossible for any serious party leader to lend their public support to racism.” She added: “The Jewish National Fund plays a critical role in facilitating the continued dispossession and suffering of Palestinians.”
Oblivious to Nutanyahoo’s murder of the two state solution (again) this week before the US Congress, Australian politician Melissa Parke keeps flogging a dead horse. Melissa’s speech is notable though for its recognition of the oppression of Israel’s occupation, a rare occurrence in the Australian Parliament. She meanders down the fallacious imperialist/zionist path of the formation of two states being central to the US national security interest and further drags Australia’s national security interest into the mix.
Is Zionism set to implode at last, unable to resolve its racist contradictions? The just rights demanded by Palestinian people in their call to boycott, divest and sanction apartheid Israel bypass and supercede the Israeli and western imperialists’ obsession with protecting racist privilege through a mythological quest for a ‘peace process’ focused on two states for two ‘peoples’, ignoring the facts that 20% of Israel’s population are not jewish, and there are half a million jewish settlers illegally squatting in the Occupied Territories. It is not the West’s ‘national security interests’ which are at stake here – how racist is it to place Palestinians’ human and political rights in the context of ‘national security’? – but credibility as purveyor of the enlightened values of democracy and human rights the developed world claims to embrace.
As Rae Abileah says: ‘Before we go preaching democracy abroad, we should make our own democracy more responsive to the public good, not the wishes of wealthy lobbyists.’ And by reference to this quote, I don’t just mean the zionist lobby, but the entire capitalist corporate lobby behemoth whose imperialist interests coincide.
‘We call on all Palestinian and Arab community associations, societies and committees, student organizations, solidarity campaigns, to reject fully and unequivocally the Statehood initiative as a distraction that unjustifiably and irresponsibly endangers Palestinian rights and institution.’
‘Like the BNC, the USPCN statement emphasizes that fundamental Palestinian rights, not “statehood” remain the core of Palestinian efforts:
As has been recently revealed, this initiative in no way protects nor advances our inalienable, and internationally recognized, rights—fundamental of which are our right to return to the homes and properties from which we were forcibly expelled, our right to self-determination, and our right to resist the settler colonial regime that has occupied our land for more than 63 years.
The Palestinian people, wherever they are, hold these rights. They are non-negotiable. No one can barter them away for false promises of “peace” and “stability.” The cynical irony of turning a UN resolution enshrining our right to return under international law (UNGA Res. 194) into a rhetorical ploy should give anyone pause. That it is being advanced at a time when the PA does not even have the political mandate of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza through Palestinian Legislative Council elections must also give us pause.;
‘Goodwin-Gill’s memo and an interview he gave explaining its implications have heightened concern among Palestinians about the PA’s ill-thought out and desperate step which comes after the complete failure of the US-sponsored “peace process” on which the PA bet all its cards.’
‘But more importantly, the South African comparison helps illuminate why the ambitious projects of pacification, “institution building” and economic development that the Ramallah PA and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have whole-heartedly embarked upon are not actually exercises in “state-building.” Rather, they emulate with frightening closeness and consistency South Africa’s policies and stages in building the Bantustan/Homelands. Indeed, Fayyad’s project to achieve political stability through economic development is the same process that was openly formalized in the South African
He insisted in the interview that Palestinians would not be able to force the right of return for Palestinian refugees on Israelis within the context of a peace agreement, but that he seeks a “just solution.”
There are three major conditions needed for a free viable Palestinian state. The first is national unity – the Palestinian state needs to represent all Palestinians as one people whether inside or outside of Occupied Palestine. A second component is economic viability – a Palestinian state needs be able to make its own decisions on sovereign matters and not be held hostage to foreign aid and the will of donor countries. A third and major component of a Palestinian state is security – it needs to have the strength to claim the land and protect is people either through an army or some form of international guarantees.’
Of course, in traditional Christianity and in Orthodox Judaism, hostility to gays exceeds the few vague references in the Qur’an. But Israeli writers, very much like classical anti-Semites, are so obsessed with their hatred of Islam and Muslims that they have to bring it in no matter what. Furthermore, openly or semi openly “gay” leaders (like Sultan Qaboos) have served as heads of state in Arab and Muslim lands but not in Israel.
‘the power of secular pro-democracy movements throughout the region now reverberate in Palestine as a validation of grassroots resistance.
If that feedback loop can be harnessed to reinvigorate the idea of Palestinian liberation, then we might finally see the ends and the means match up in the struggle to defeat imperialism, violence and dictatorship.’
Zionism and imperialism – two heads of the same grotesque beast, which advances the cause of robber barons who defend their own interests under the holy shibboleth of capitalism.
“At 700 kilometres long, with 85 per cent of its route inside the West Bank, the Barrier cuts off communities from basic services, denies people access to their homes, and leaves thousands of people dependent on humanitarian handouts.”
Recounting a meeting she had with Palestinians who had been evicted from their homes in East Jerusalem to make way for Israeli settlements, Ms. Amos said they faced daily violence and threats from settlers, noting the attacks on Palestinians are rarely prosecuted.
Thousands of Palestinians had lost their right to live in East Jerusalem and those in the West Bank struggled to access specialized education and reach medical facilities that are only available in Jerusalem.
Fact-checking Netanyahu’s Speech DePaul vote on Sabra hummus a victory for human rights: SJP’s strategy is not predicated on the elimination of an Israeli state. Rather, it deals purely with human rights. The logic is simple; boycotting Sabra hummus and other similarly problematic products sends a strong signal to owners of the companies that make them, which is that any profiteering from human rights violations will not be tolerated.
