It is April 1933 and the Nazi storm troopers (Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933) enforce a boycott of Jewish businesses. Fast forward 77 years later and there are now organized cultural boycotts against Israel. Several rock stars (many of them frankly past their prime) have succumbed to pressure to cancel their concerts in Israel. However several (including Paul McCartney, Madonna, Metallica, and Elton John) have refused to cave in. Make no mistake about it – this is all part of a plan to demonize the Jewish state to the point where its ultimate liquidation would be considered a desirable goal.
by Alex Brummer
Israel, and Tel Aviv in particular, has long regarded itself as a home of cultural cool. It is the kind of place which ranks alongside Barcelona for its eclectic mix of bars, boutiques and Bauhaus architecture.
Moreover, it has developed a distinct cultural heritage with its world-class writers like David Grossman, prize-winning movies like Waltz with Bashir, and prize winners such as Yael Bartana who recently carried off the 4th Artes Mundi Prize at the National Museum of Cardiff.
It was therefore almost inevitable that those who seek to deligitimise the Jewish state would seek to move beyond academic and economic boycotts and seek to target its popularity with visiting artists.
The IDF assault on the Gaza ‘aid’ convoy has provided just the excuse to find new ways of punishing Israel. As the FT has reported, the trend started earlier this year when guitarist Carlos Santana cancelled his summer gig in Tel Aviv without explanation.
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Among the first performers to join the cultural boycott was Elvis Costello, who said that “merely having your name added to a concert may be interpreted as a political act… it may be assumed that one has no mind for the suffering of the innocent”. The rock world looks to have caught the bug.
An unofficial Bob Dylan website, Dylanchords, apparently ignoring the singer’s ethnic background, has put in place firewalls which block Israelis trying to access the site in the wake of the flotilla raid. According to Ha’aretz, Israeli users are redirected to a page which declares, “As a contribution to a cultural boycott of Israel …Dylanchords has been blocked for visitors from Israel.”
The boycott calls have even made the headlines in Billboard, one of America’s most widely read showbiz papers and websites. It quotes Omar Barghouti, described as a choreographer and human rights activist, as saying the concert cancellations expose Israel for being a “colonial and apartheid state.”
Billboard noted that many top-of-the-bill musicians still perform in Israel, including Madonna and the Black Eyed Peas, who played to full stadiums last summer.
This year Elton John and Jeff Beck remain on the calendar.
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It might, of course, be thought that the ramblings of a few aging pop stars and luvvie authors is unimportant. But for students of the blacklisting of Jewish culture during the Nazi era, it will have alarming connotations.
Read the rest: Boycott recalls a darker era
Addedeum by Bob in Breckenridge: ‘Tectonic rift’ in Jewish Americans’ opinion of Obama
File this in the “I’ll believe it when I actually see it”, or “Actions speak louder than words” category, but I’ll wait until 2012 before I fully buy into this. Most Jews are secular or Reform Jews, and therefore their liberalism plays a bigger role in their lives than their religion. Only 36% of Jews consider themselves Orthodox or conservative.
From The Daily Caller–
‘Tectonic rift’ in Jewish Americans’ opinion of Obama
Support for President Obama is waning among America’s Jewish population, polls indicate, a shift driven primarily by the president’s policies toward Israel.
The London Telegraph reported this weekend that Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, described the state of U.S.-Israeli relations in bleak terms, saying the two nations “are in a state of tectonic rift in which continents are drifting apart.” While Oren since has asserted that he was misquoted and that his words were less incendiary than reported, even relatively disinterested observers can see that relations between the allies are strained.
McLaughlin & Associates, a national polling company, recently released the “National Survey of Jewish Voters” which reported that while Jewish voters favored Obama 78 percent to 12 percent in the 2008 presidential exit polls, currently, “only 42 percent of voters would re-elect him, while the plurality (46 percent) would consider voting for someone else.”
Ed Koch, former New York mayor, campaigned for Obama in the 2008 presidential election but told The Daily Caller that he believes the Obama presidency represents a very serious problem for supporters of Israel.
“His campaign promises and image as a friend to Israel during the election were one thing, his actions have been very different,” Koch said. Koch does not believe he was misguided during the campaign, but rather that the president’s views had shifted, the first indication of which, Koch noted, was the Obama’s Cairo speech. “The No. 1 problem I see with Obama is that he is not willing to stand up to Islamic terrorism, he conveys weakness and his Israel policy is a subset of that failure.” Despite his frustrations, Koch was coy on whether he would support Obama in the future: “It depends on who was running.”
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Morton A. Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), told The Daily Caller that the ZOA was one of the few groups that warned Obama would be hostile to Israel.
Click on the links above to read the whole articles mentioned.
