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Jerusalem Quartet Concert at London’s Wigmore Hall is Disrupted & Radio 3’s Live Broadcast is Terminated


Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Jerusalem Quartet Concert at London’s Wigmore Hall is Disrupted & Radio 3’s Live Broadcast is Terminated

I have a confession to make. I nearly didn’t make it. Yesterday I put my watch and car clock forward but forgot to do so for my mobile and radio alarm! Result was that I got up an hour later than intended! Fortunately I managed to get the next train to Victoria and despite further loss of time as I was (twice) misdirected, I got there only 10 minutes late.

There of course is London’s Wigmore Hall, home to the more discerning of nature’s liberals. Except that scratch a liberal and you will often find an angry conservative!

Jointly organised by members of Brighton PSC and J-Big (Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods) we ensured that the performance by the Jerusalem Quartet, the Israeli Army’s faithful musicians, didn’t go unchallenged.

Because in Scotland a similar protest in Edinburgh has resulted in 5 protestors being bizarrely charged with racism (it’s either anti-semitism or a non-existent Israeli nationality!) it was important that this protest included a Jewish contingent.

Along with an irate old lady who wanted to gain immediate entrance, despite being late, I was kept waiting for a pause in the proceedings. Fortunately our very own opera singer, Debbie Fink of J-Big, decided that she would try and enliven what was frankly a pretty dismal and boring performance by Israel’s finest. As her voice rose in harmony with the vultures on stage it seemed that at first people thought it was part of the show. However Debbie soon received a red card which quite fortunately enabled me to gain my entrance, apologising of course for my late arrival and any disruption that that might cause.

Having gained my seat, the Quartet quickly decided to resume playing. After rehearsing what I was going to say, I stood up after about 5 minutes later and proceeded to tell the JQ that they were the cultural ambassadors of Apartheid Israel and its Army whom they perform for.

Now I confess I don’t claim to understand those who pay to come and listen to musicians with blood on their hands. But then I don’t understand why Wagner was what he was. However I always thought that listening to classical music made you more not less peaceful. Instead as I began to contribute to the concert’s proceedings people began to get animated and started hitting me with their programmes! Not that I was hurt and nor did it distract me from the message I was getting across but it illustrates the Zionist mentality. Security however was quickly off the mark and I was, well not dragged but escorted off the premises, with one of the heavies shouting ‘fuck off’ at my back, to which I could but reply that that wasn’t very nice! The Police quickly entered but to my consternation and amazement did nothing. Given what had happened in Scotland I expected to be arrested. Instead I was merely thrown out into the street.

The next two to be evicted were members of Brighton PSC and the final evictee an activist in ISM. As we were gathering at a nearby café, a member of the audience came over to us to congratulate us on our protest which made us even more pleased. And when we learnt that the live broadcast by Radio 3 (which included Debbie’s initial operatic rendition) had been terminated we were even more over the moon.

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Empire – What future for ‘Greater Israel’?

From al Jazeera
Six decades after its founding, Israel has grown into one of the world’s top 20 industrial states, with GNP (General National Product) superior to all its neighbours combined.

With an estimated 200 nuclear warheads, and one of the most advanced air forces in the world, Israel promotes itself as the Middle East’s most powerful military and one of the world’s five leading arms exporters.

Priding itself on being a Western-type democracy; Israel has always sought close relations with empires and superpowers, underlining its estrangement within its own region.

Thanks to decades of preferential treatment by Western superpowers, Israel has had its cake and eaten it too. It has occupied, annexed and exploited Palestinian and Arab lands with impunity, and at the same time received over $100bn as the West’s foremost ally in the Middle East.

Israel’s control over the Occupied Territories has radicalised its own society and identity as much as it has deformed that of the Palestinians. And yet, despite all, Israel’s borders remain undrawn, its capital unrecognised, its Jewishness unaccepted, and its security in question.

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Hundreds Mark Land Day In Beit Sahour Town, Southern West Bank

On Tuesday March 30th, 2010, hundreds of women with their children, nearly 300 high school students, many university students, and teachers joined farmers and activists at the town of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, Southern West Bank, to mark Land Day. Full Story at http://www.imemc.org/article/58325

thank you Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD
A Bedouin in Cyberspace, a villager at home
http://www.qumsiyeh.org

See also Palm Day March here

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Children of Gaza


source

A moving, must-see video that first aired on Channel 4 (UK)’s Dispatches on 15 March. BAFTA-winning filmmaker Jezza Neumann follows the lives of three children for over a year. The children are amazing: well-spoken, reflective, resilient, understandably vengeful and fearful, but very endearing. The toll this inhumanity has taken is also clear.

Documentary filmmaker Jezza Neumann writes about his experiences while making The Children of Gaza.

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Protesters disrupt Jerusalem Quartet recital

29 March 2010

Transmission of today’s BBC Radio 3 Wigmore Hall lunchtime recital, given by the Jerusalem String Quartet, was abandoned after a group of anti-Israeli protesters infiltrated the hall and disrupted the performance with shouts, chants and bursts of song. The concert continued once the demonstrators had been removed, but the broadcast was replaced by a performance of the same repertoire by the Salomon Quartet.

Wigmore Hall director John Gilhooly told CM that there had been pickets outside the hall earlier in the morning, so some sort of disturbance was not entirely unexpected, especially in the light of a similar protest that took place when the Jerusalem Quartet appeared at the Edinburgh festival a few years ago. ‘But today’s demonstration was evidently extremely well planned,’ he said.

‘The protesters must have bought their tickets for the concert a long time ago, because they were all sitting in individual seats in different parts of the hall. One stood up and started singing and shouting, and while we were removing him another one started up somewhere else, and so on.’

The quartet continued to play and completed its programme – Mozart’s String Quartet in D K575 and Ravel’s String Quartet in F. ‘The concert took an hour and 20 minutes instead of an hour, and the atmosphere in the hall was very tense,’ said Mr Gilhooly.

The Radio 3 broadcast was truncated ‘in order to deny these people publicity’, and replaced with a performance of the same repertoire by the Salomon Quartet. The Jerusalem players stayed on afterwards to re-record some sections of the music and a patched version of the recital will be broadcast in Saturday’s repeat slot.

Posters to the Radio 3 Performance message board reported that the protest had been announced on Sunday in a Twitter message urging protesters to join an ‘urgent demo against Jerusalem Quartet 12.30 Wigmore Hall’ to ‘boycott ambassadors of apartheid Israel’.

According to a report in the Jewish Chronicle, the protesters were accusing the players of being ‘cultural ambassadors for the state of Israel, promoting the interests of Israel and all its policies against the Palestinians, to the British public’.

However, in response to the incident Mr Gilhooly said: ‘I want to make the point very strongly that we can’t possibly condone any kind of disturbance to an artistic event. Wigmore Hall is a totally non-political organisation, and by disrupting performances the protesters completely take away the whole meaning of an artistic event, which is something that transcends politics.’

source

How to do it

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SALMOND: TRADE RELATIONS WITH ISRAEL CAN’T BE “NORMAL” AFTER MOSSAD PASSPORT FORGERIES

Tuesday, 30 March 2010 23:42

Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign: Media Release

SALMOND: TRADE RELATIONS WITH ISRAEL CAN’T BE “NORMAL” AFTER MOSSAD PASSPORT FORGERIES

Scotland’s First Minister has called for a review of the UK’s trading relationships with Israel, after it emerged that Israel’s Mossad had forged British passports for use in the assassination of a Palestinian Hamas leader.

Speaking on the BBC’s Question Time, Alex Salmond told the audience, “you can’t have normal relationships if you believe another country has been involved in what Israel has been involved in”.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced last week that a Mossad agent was to be expelled from the UK over the Israeli intelligence agency’s “intolerable” misuse of British passports in the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in January.

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What the Reut Institute really wants: NOT one person-one vote

by Cecilie Surasky under Reut Institute.

A week after his visit to AIPAC, I am left wondering if it is possible for anyone other than Bibi Netanyahu to so beautifully embody the notion of “strutting victimization”. And yet, it’s not just Bibi who can taunt Israel’s primary sponsor, the United States, with plans for endless settlement expansion while simultaneously playing the powerless victim. (I’m sure my Israeli friends have much to say on this phenomenon.) The people at Israel’s Reut Institute have also mastered this unpleasant juxtaposition of aggression and powerlessness.

As Carol Sanders put it so beautifully in The Only Democracy?:

Reut Institute, a leading Israeli national security and socioeconomic policy think tank, has released its preliminary report on “The Delegitimization Challenge: Creating a Political Firewall” In an extraordinary exercise in doublethink, Reut scratches its head over Israel’s declining diplomatic status in the aftermath of its assault on Gaza and the Goldstone Report, and concludes that, yet again, it is the victim.

Among its key victimizers, and therefore targets? Human rights and peace organizations.

read on

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The mud squad in Arlington

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Deconfliction

The Agency: CIA terrorist sting operation in a Post Office. A good video to show why deconfliction is so important, with an added appearance from the FBI, the former INS, the Secret Service, and the Local Police.

thanx Gilad

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