Beatles, don't let it be!

Jewish Media Facilitator Creates Buzz

 

On Feb. 2, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) circulated a letter to discourage the surviving Beatles from holding a reunion in Tel Aviv to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. PACBI was responding to the BBC story entitled Banned Beatles get Israel invite, which later was revealed as planned collusion between the Jewish director of the Beatles Story Museum, Jerry Goldman, and the Israeli ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, to generate some pro-Israel publicity. (One also must wonder about the role of the person who placed this vacuous story on the BBC website.)

 

In Judonia Rising: The Israel Lobby and American Society I made the following observation.

Israel Advocates as Thought Police

Then there are all sorts of groups and individuals that covertly and informally act as Israel advocates. Jewish cliques within Interfaith discussion groups[2] often engage in subtle Israel advocacy or enmeshment while the often-transnational Jewish networks in academia, across various professions and in the finance industry often serve Zionist purposes of exclusion of Arabs, Muslims and anti-Zionists or of control of discourse. The David Project, which works with informal networks of Jewish doctors, has inserted Zionist propaganda into the Harvard Medical School through its subsidiary X-Ray Project. [3]

The members of the Jewish finance networks trade insider information and protect each other. Membership generally requires politically correct attitudes towards Israel. Expressions of sympathy toward Palestinians can end careers — at least until Gulf and Saudi Arabs buy enough of the NY investment banks, but the networks might manage to persist with greater secrecy.

The media industry is full of all sorts of facilitators and gatekeepers as researchers like Alison Weir have carefully documented, and they have a clear effect on the coverage of the conflict over Palestine even in cases where the media owners are themselves unbiased.  

Even though Spielberg himself is an Israel advocate, he strayed from Zionist political correctness in Munich and was subjected to a concerted media attack. The Hollywood Crowd got the message, and the marketing of Munich ran into all sorts of "unforeseen" problems. As a result, the movie probably only made one third of reasonable expectations in gross ticket receipts, and it will probably be a long time before Spielberg deviates from the Zionist narrative to give Palestinians another 20 seconds of sympathy.

Beyond the facilitators and gatekeepers there are thousands to tens of thousands — often students or retirees — who will make faxes, letters, calls, emails or come to gatherings on behalf of organizations connected with Israel advocacy.

The Beatles Story Museum is to a large extent a part of the music production industry, which is predominantly Jewish (Yiddish or ethnic Ashkenazi). In this case Goldman is just another Jewish Zionist facilitator using his position at the museum to spread Zionist propaganda for free.

 

Goldman gets away with shows of support for the State of Israel because Liverpool hosts an extremist Jewish community.

 

According to Merseyside Jewish - Community

Since the Second World War, Liverpool Jewry has consolidated around the new geographic, economic and institutional framework of which the outlines were already clearly visible in the late 1930s. Slum clearance and the Blitz hastened the final evacuation of the old Jewish Quarter as the Jewish population acquired a new suburban coherence in Childwall, Allerton and Woolton, with a number of older families still anchored to Sefton Park. By the l970s, Dunbabin Road had decisively superseded Princes Road as the main artery of Liverpool Jewry. There, in 1956, King David School became the first Jewish secondary school to be opened under the provisions of the 1944 Education Act it was joined by the Jewish Primary School, which had held out in Hope Place, in 1964. There, too, was built a new Harold House as the focus of the Jewish youth organisations co-ordinated since 1951 by the Merseyside Youth Council and, more generally, as the major social, cultural and political centre of Liverpool's Jewish communal life.

....

 

A survey conducted in 1964 suggested that a Jewish Community of some 7,000 people was then declining in size at a rate of at least 1% a year, as the birth rate dropped and younger people sought the richer textures of communal life in London and Manchester and economic opportunities beyond an increasingly depressed city. By the mid-1970s the population had fallen to around 6,500 and it is now thought to lie in the region of 5,000 (1987). It seems unlikely that this trend will be reversed. Equally unlikely, however, is that a compact business and professional community, solidly integrated into the life of the city, its Zionist fervour undiminished, its welfare agencies streamlined, will cease to exercise an influence on Anglo-Jewry out of all proportion to its size.

Progressives really have to start working on decreasing the influence of this racist community that shamelessly supports aggression, ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Middle East.

 

The BBC article mentioned that "Liverpool is trying to develop cultural links with Israel, including the possibility of building a new museum dedicated to Jewish music."

 

Does Liverpool really need a museum dedicated to such a ridiculous fabrication?

 

I have studied Judaica for years. There is no such thing as Jewish music. In the nineteenth century cultural productions of Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe began to include a sort of popular music based on models that Poles and other neighboring ethnic groups were producing as part of the program of creating national identity, but it is hard to consider the Jewish (Yiddish) version of such music traditional in any sense.

 

Before the nineteenth century Eastern European Jewish (Yiddish) music production was confined to synagogue liturgy and religious rituals for the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. Some Jewish studies specialists attempt to connect the associated Eastern European melodies and musical structures to hypothesized Judean or Israelite music, but such efforts belong to the effort to create a primordialist national consciousness and not to genuine scholarship.

 

Before the nineteenth century when professional Jewish musicians became more common in E. Europe, Jews generally hired non-Jewish performers to play at occasions like weddings where music was appropriate. The repertoire of such non-Jewish musicians became the basis for the genre of music that is known today as "Jewish" klezmer.

 

Any Liverpool museum of Jewish music will just be another institution dedicated to Zionist propaganda and will provide pro-Israel publicity through on-going projects of the sort that Goldman opportunistically managed to fabricate with the Israeli Ambassador through the Beatles Story Museum as a sort of one-time special.

 

Beatles, don't let it be! Palestinian Dispossession and Israeli Apartheid are no Cause for Celebration

  PACBI | | February 2, 2008

Open Letter to the Beatles

Forty-three years ago, the government of Israel banned your performance in the country for fear you would corrupt the minds of Israeli youth. Now, Israel is extending an apology and an invitation to you, hoping you will forget the past and agree to help celebrate its 60th "birthday." The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) urges you to say no to Israel, particularly since the creation of this state 60 years ago dispossessed and uprooted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and lands, condemning them to a life of exile and destitution.

There is no reason to celebrate! Israel at 60 is a state that is still denying Palestinian refugees their UN-sanctioned rights, simply because they are "non-Jews." It is still illegally occupying Palestinian and other Arab lands, in violation of numerous UN resolutions. It is still persistently and grossly breaching international law and infringing fundamental human rights with impunity afforded to it through munificent US and European economic, diplomatic and political support. It is still treating its own Palestinian citizens with institutionalized discrimination.

Now, more than ever, Israel is committing horrific war crimes, especially in the occupied Gaza Strip, where its illegal and immoral policy of collective punishment -- through a hermetic military siege and an almost complete blockage of fuel, electric power, and even food and medicine -- is pushing 1.5 million Palestinian civilians to the brink of starvation. Without electricity, incubators are shutting down; hospitals are fast coming to a standstill; water is not being properly purified nor separated from raw sewage; whatever is left from the local economy is undergoing a meltdown; and the most vulnerable sectors of the population, the children, the elderly, and the acutely ill, are languishing under unspeakable hardships. Do you see any reason to celebrate?

Israel's military occupation -- the longest in modern history -- is not an abstract notion to us. It manifests itself in wilful killings of civilians, particularly children; wanton demolition of homes and property; uprooting of more than a million fruitful trees; incessant theft of land and water resources; denial of freedom of movement to millions; and cutting up the occupied Palestinian territory into Bantustans, some entirely caged by walls, fences and hundreds of roadblocks.

In light of the above, performing in Israel at this time is morally equivalent to performing in South Africa at the height of the apartheid era. Indeed, Israel has created a worse system of apartheid than anything that ever existed in South Africa, according to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights Prof. John Dugard, and South African government minister Ronnie Kasrils, among others.

In 2005, inspired by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, Palestinian civil society called for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) [1] against Israel until it fully complies with international law and recognizes the fundamental human rights of the people of Palestine. A specific call for cultural boycott of Israel [2] was issued a year later, garnering wide support. Among the many groups and institutions that have heeded the Palestinian boycott calls and started to consider or apply diverse forms of effective pressure on Israel are the British University and College Union (UCU); the two largest trade unions in the UK; the Church of England; the Presbyterian Church (USA); prominent British architects; the British National Union of Journalists (NUJ); the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU); the South African Council of Churches; the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) in Ontario; Aosdana, the Irish state-sponsored academy of artists; celebrated authors, artists and intellectuals led by John Berger; and Palme d'Or winner director Ken Loach.

We strongly urge you to uphold the values of freedom, equality and just peace for all by joining this growing boycott against Israeli apartheid. Nothing less would do justice to the legendary legacy of the Beatles.

PACBI

www.PACBI.org

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[1] http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=66_0_1_10_M11

[2] http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=315_0_1_0_C

 

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