...the racist, neoliberal imbecile. Another one who fell over himself to praise the Brave Ukrainian Resistance, no matter how many atrocities they committed...
*****
Bono dedicates song to Israeli festivalgoers killed by Hamas militants
Bono dedicates song to victims of Israeli music festival attacked by Hamas Militants Maeve McTaggart Mon 9 Oct 2023 at 14:00
Bono has paid tribute to those who were attending an Israeli music festival when it was attacked by Hamas on Saturday.
At least 250 young people were killed at the Supernova festival when Palestinian militants launched their attack, shooting and firing artillery as attendees tried to flee.
More are missing, with some having been taken captive.
The U2 frontman dedicated a song to the hundreds of victims of the attack during a concert at The Sphere in Las Vegas on Sunday night.
"We sing for our brothers and sisters, who they themselves were singing at the Supernova festival in Israel. We sing for those,” he said.
"Our people – our kind of people, music people, playful, experimental people. Our kind of people. We sing for them.”
Bono dedicated Pride (In the Name of Love) to those who died at the festival.
The frontman reportedly changed the lyrics to “Early morning October 7, the sun is rising in the desert sky, stars of David, they took your life but they could not take your pride.”
He later told the crowd it had been “a festival of music and peace, can you imaging what these f***ers were doing”, before singing the song MLK.
At a US gig in 1987, the Irish rocker famously hit out at the IRA bombing of the Remembrance Day ceremony in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, which killed 12 people that same day, before launching into Sunday Bloody Sunday.Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Sanctimonious prick. NM
Posted by johnlilburne on October 13, 2023, 11:26 am, in reply to "Bongo"
nm
Bongo, the guy who is best mates with G. Bush JR & Tiny Bliar, knut nm
Posted by Ian M on October 13, 2023, 11:37 am, in reply to "Bongo"
Missed this bit. Couldn't get more blatant:
'U2 frontman Bono has offered his condolences to the hundreds of young victims murdered by Hamas at the Supernova music festival in Israel.
Speaking during the Irish rock band’s Las Vegas show on Sunday night, Bono told the crowd: “We sing for our brothers and sisters, who they themselves were singing at the Supernova Succot festival in Israel. We sing for those. Our people. Our kind of people. Music people, playful, experimental people. Our kind of people. We sing for them.” ' - https://www.thejc.com/news/news/you-can't-blame-british-jews-for-being-incensed-by-hamas-violence-says-jon-sopel-6Dqf214ELM4fo1HyFEiCpt
Hmmm, I wonder if there might be any reason that those kind of people are to be found in Israel and not Gaza?
Salsabeel H. Hamdan Israel-Palestine Posted On June 9, 2019
Gaza’s only music store opened in 2017. (PHOTO SALSABEEL. H. HAMDAN) Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2019, pp. 34-35 Special Report By Salsabeel H. Hamdan
“WHEN MUSIC IS SUPPRESSED within a society, there is something wrong within its history, ideology, mind and—of course—spirit,” says Naem Nasir, a former music teacher and now a well-known director of plays produced in both Gaza and the West Bank.
Visitors to Gaza very quickly notice a strained relationship between local social norms and one of the most important facets of any culture—music. The practice and presence of music is limited, neglected and sometimes not even welcomed. Due to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade and the current highly conservative government and social norms, there are no music majors in secondary school or university, for example, and most (if not all) of few private teachers have left the Strip. The only music funded or otherwise supported to any significant degree is that which exalts Islam or adheres to a narrow definition of Palestinian heritage.
Once visitors pick up on this characteristic of culture in Gaza (and to a much lesser extent, the West Bank), they often ask, “Why did it evolve this way and when?” Naem Nasir is a music historian of sorts in Gaza—but he also speaks from painful personal experience about what he calls “the loss of our musical heritage.”
Nasir is a Palestinian born in the Gaza Strip and is now a theater director. But his original vocation was as a music teacher, both in Libya and Gaza. Twice he has been imprisoned in Israel for protesting the occupation—the first time for two years while in high school and the second for six months during the First Intifada. It was during his first imprisonment that he composed two of his first musicals.
Over the course of his career, Nasir produced and wrote more than 50 plays, musical scores and short poems—appearing in several short films along the way after he got his certification in drama and music from Ashtar Art School in Ramallah. The school sent foreign teachers to Gaza periodically and he was one of the fortunate few to be allowed to study with them for three years.
Nasir went on to participate in many Arabic and European festivals, which enriched his development as a composer and director—a benefit today’s Palestinian artists from Gaza don’t have. Toward the end of the 1990s, he founded both the Masafat Theater Group and the Palestine Orchestra for Arabic Music in Gaza; however, Nasir was forced to shut both down less than a year later due to lack of funding. Nasir is still producing plays, but not music.
“My heart deteriorated after I had to close the orchestra,” he recalls. “I become really emotional whenever I remember the loss; the government couldn’t even afford a place for my musicians to rehearse.”
IMPACT OF OCCUPATION
Palestine had a rich and a very varied musical heritage (before 1948),” he says. “Every village had its own musical taste and style, different from other villages, and this gave birth to many unique, traditional songs. But that all changed when Israel was created and its forces occupied our land, tearing all this apart.”
The displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians disrupted the social fabric, destroying along with it much of their cultural and musical heritage. Instruments typically aren’t among the items seized when people are in a rush to leave a house under siege, and living in squalid conditions in refugee camps is not conducive to a “luxury” like making music.
This destruction of a society, thought at first to be short-term but later proven to be as good as permanent, had inevitable consequences that persist today. Every generation since 1948 evolves further away from its cultural roots. Moreover, notes Nasir, the cultures of the countries to which the refugees moved (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt) “invaded” over time what remains of Palestinian identity.
“I feel sick when I attend wedding parties in Gaza and don’t hear a single Palestinian wedding song played there, as we used to years ago,” Nasir says. “Instead, we have these Egyptian songs and music styles, as if we do not have wedding songs of our own.”
He adds, however, that the music of many neighboring countries, especially Lebanon and Jordan, heavily borrowed from the original Palestinian music.
There also has been a push over the years to revive and nurture Palestinian heritage. And some Palestinian youth listen and feel an affinity to what is now called Palestinian music, with its themes related to patriotism, wars and lost land. But this, says Nasir, is not representative of the rich breadth of the original Palestinian music.
“Over time, the occupation narrowed Palestinian music to specific niches,” he explains. “It’s like the occupation of the land is now also an occupation of our culture and our minds. We focus almost exclusively on the need to uplift the spirit of Palestinians, free our land and honor the martyrs and their mothers.”
Still another layer of occupation that has affected musical expression among Palestinians, especially in Gaza, is the Israeli blockade, which prevents most musical instruments, as well as performers and teachers, from entering.
For example, Khamis Abushaban, of the Edward Said Conservatory of Music in Gaza, recently told The Independent that, “We had a cello teacher who was living here since 1997 but this year she had to go back to Romania for personal reasons. We had a Russian colleague who taught guitar and trumpet, but unfortunately, she left in October too. Of course, here we have no replacement. So those lessons are gone.”
Nasir observes, “The siege has doubled the problem! In my youth, I used to be able to travel to Europe and interact with other musicians from different nationalities who played other genres of music from all over the world. Thus, I was able to develop my own, unique style of music, as a Palestinian, by seeing how different or similar it was to others’. I could learn from other techniques, while protecting it from being confused with neighboring musical styles, especially Arabic, Egyptian, Turkish or what is called Israeli music.”
The characteristics that make Palestinian music unique have now become so vague, says Nasir, that Palestinian youth today often do not recognize the music or songs that originated in their own culture, other than those with patriotic themes.
IMPACT OF RELIGIOUS TRENDS
Another limiting force on music in Gaza today is what Nasir labels false religious beliefs. Some religious scholars regard music as trivial or even haram (prohibited) unless it relates to motherhood, patriotism or Islam.
Nasir responds that this is an extreme interpretation of Islam and, in fact, many Gazans do not believe in such a strict interpretation. For example, Mohammad Assaf, the first Gazan Palestinian to win the Arab Idol competition, performed many Western pop songs and was encouraged by his friends and family. That’s not to deny that he had his detractors; he remains a controversial figure in Gaza.
Several youths in Gaza who were interviewed for this piece, but did not want to be named, said they would be afraid to publicly embrace other types of music. “Society, as well as our parents, believe that music is only for partiers and losers, who have not been guided by Allah to the righteous path,” said one. “It is not the image they want for us in front of society and relatives; they want us to be doctors, engineers and ‘religious’ people.”
A CUMULATIVE OPPRESSION
As a result of all of these dynamics, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics found in 2015 that only 39.2 percent of Gazans listen to music, compared to 71.2 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank.
However, there are some early signs of resurgence: A store that sells musical instruments opened in Gaza in 2017 and, in October, diploma programs in drama and music opened at Gaza University, the first of their kind. (Note, however, that the university’s website cautions that the programs will be offered for only a year, until the need for these professions decreases. In addition, no actual instruction with instruments will be offered; the focus is viewed as more technical than “fine arts”—preparing people to work in radio and TV, for instance.)
Finding instructors for those programs will be a challenge. There is no government funding for teaching or reviving Palestinian musical heritage, and there are fewer than five centers/institutions that teach music in the entire Gaza Strip.
Is all of this important, given the dire economic conditions in Gaza? Music doesn’t put food on the table, after all. Nasir says “yes.” When there is a destruction of any aspect of culture, he says, “it is easier for Israel and other colonial powers to fill the gap with their own inventions—and thus destroy the very existence of a Palestinian identity.”
Salsabeel Hamdan is a Gaza-based writer for WeAreNotNumbers.org, a youth project that pairs international mentor-authors with youth in the Strip to share the human stories behind the numbers in the news.Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Re: i'm starting to have my doubts about him.nm
Posted by Sir Michael Mouse on October 13, 2023, 1:32 pm, in reply to "'Our kind of people'"
.
Still haven't seen any evidence....nm
Posted by Keith-264 on October 13, 2023, 12:02 pm, in reply to "Bongo"
nmThe last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
It's a wall to wall propaganda in the msm, obscuring the fact that unsubstantiated claims becomes their narrative. All that I have have seen regarding the festival-goers was people running away, for example. I've come across some snippets that claimed that there was some shooting happened. That's it.
Similar to the claim about 40 babies masacre spouted by a blood-thirsty settler, which has been walked back by the ptb. Second claim about the German tattoo artiste being paraded by Hamas in the back of the truck turned out to be that they were taking her to the hospital. See sashimi's post where this was discussed - sorry, no timeline: https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/msg/1697196766.html
So, agree with your take that there should be more evidence. My take is that it is bs. We wait.
I’m wondering who the 1200 dead in Israel are - mostly civilians, mostly military, are they counting Hamas fighters? 1200 is a lot of people.
I think we are all wondering, and we need to remember this is all wall to wall 'atrocity prop'. As pedestrian as it may seem, we need to wait for the facts which are thin on the ground at the mo. Being a curtain type of sceptic I may be, using the ratio of 1:10 I'd say 120: 1180 in Israhell's favour. It's bound to get worse for Palestinians in future methinks
Remember the speed with which the Met and Corp-0-rat media
It has been repeated endlessly that 260 young Israelis were killed at the open air music festival Bono refers to by Hamas. In any shooting incident, the ratio of numbers wounded to those killed will obviously depend on the circumstances - incapacitated victims in a confined space may result in little or no wounded - but generally many more people are wounded than killed. So, a large number of those attending the festival should have been wounded, be in hospital and be capable of being interviewed.
I've no doubt some Israelis died as a result of Hamas' attacks but I suspect the numbers have been inflated. There's no independent verification going on and few in western MSM trying to establish the truth.
"The kids" at "the gig" ruthlessly slaughtered like this week's US school shooting