An Open Letter to Branford Marsalis
from the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine
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17 June 2008

you said what drew you to jazz is that it's 'about freedom'. Yet you will be playing to an audience whose government and army operate a rigid system of checkpoints that keep several million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza de facto prisoners in their towns and villages. Many in your audience will be young Israelis who are inflicting this misery -- but Palestinian fans of Branford Marsalis from the Occupied West Bank and Gaza will not be allowed into Israel to hear you. Would you have agreed to play to a white South African audience under apartheid?

Dear Branford Marsalis:

Inventive and independent musician that you are, it seems to us that you're constantly exploring aspects of black American experience. And jazz is one of the most triumphant expressions of African-Americans' resistance to forced removal, ruthless suppression, and murderous racism.

Yet you are reportedly going to play a concert in a country whose government and army are even now inflicting similar cruelties on another people. Is it possible that when you agreed to play in Tel Aviv on July 17, you did not think what message this would send to the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, many of whom now live in refugee camps outside their homeland, or in exile across the world? They were driven out en masse in 1948 and 1967, and no Israeli government has ever allowed them, their children, or their children's children, to return.

Palestinians may not have been transported in stinking, deathly slave-ships, but they are as unwilling a diaspora as the millions of Africans whose forced labour and intense suffering built the wealth of the 'New World' (and the old one).

We are writing to ask you to reconsider your decision to play in Israel. We are wondering how a musician with your sensitivity will be able to stand on a stage and play reflective, subtle jazz while less than an hour's drive away, a million-and-a-half people in Gaza -- two-thirds of them refugees -- endure yet another night of hunger, darkness and fear because of the iron-clad siege the Israeli government has enforced against them for years.

Perhaps you saw that in May, former archbishop Desmond Tutu described this siege as an 'abomination'. Maybe you read former US president Jimmy Carter's article in the UK paper The Guardian, describing what the Israelis are doing to Palestinians in Gaza as 'a terrible human rights crime'. How will you keep the echo of their words out of your head?

When Ken Burns interviewed you for his television series, you said what drew you to jazz is that it's 'about freedom'. Yet you will be playing to an audience whose government and army operate a rigid system of checkpoints that keep several million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza de facto prisoners in their towns and villages. Many in your audience will be young Israelis who are inflicting this misery -- but Palestinian fans of Branford Marsalis from the Occupied West Bank and Gaza will not be allowed into Israel to hear you. Would you have agreed to play to a white South African audience under apartheid?

If you stand up on that stage in the Tel Aviv opera house you'll be telling the Palestinians their suffering -- the product of colonialism and racism -- doesn't matter. You'll be saying you don't care that Palestinian civil society has issued a strong call to artists to boycott Israel (you can see it on www.pacbi.org). You'll be giving a slap in the face to the Palestinian musicians, artists, film-makers, writers and poets, who keep hope alive in circumstances meant to suffocate and crush them.

How can you, in all conscience, play Sonny Rollins' 'Freedom Suite' in Tel Aviv? Please don't go.

Yours sincerely,
Professor Haim Bresheeth
Professor Jonathan Rosenhead

British Committee for the Universities of Palestine
BM BRICUP
London
Wc1N 3XX
http://www.bricup.org.uk

A barbarian act masked as culture

Turin will host the International Book Fair in May 2008.  The Guest of Honour is Israel.  This has resulted calls for its boycott and many authors have declared their support for the boycott and will not be attending.

Aharon Shabtai, the greatest living Israeli poet says “no” both to the Turin and to the Paris Book Fair. Here is the letter he sent to Edna Degon, in charge of organizing the Israeli presence at the coming Paris Book Fair.

Aharon Shabtai

Why I Will Not Participate in the Turin Book Fair
Tariq Ali

When I agreed to participate in the Turin Book Fair, which I have done before, I had no idea that the 'guest of honour' was Israel and its 60th birthday. But this is also the 60th anniversary of what the Palestinian call the 'nakba' the disaster that befell them that year, when they were expelled from their villages, some killed, women raped by the settlers. These facts are no longer disputed. So why did the Turin Book Fair not invite Palestinians in equal numbers? 30 Israeli writers and 30 Palestinian writers (and I promise you they exist and are very fine poets and novelists) might have been seen as a positive and peaceful gesture and a positive debate might have taken place. A literary version of Daniel Barenboim's Diwan Orchestra, half-Israeli, half-Palestinian. Such a move would have brought people together, but no. The cultural commissars know best. I have argued vigorously with some of the Israeli writers visiting the fair on other occasions and would have happily done the same again if conditions had been different. What they decided to do is an ugly provocation.

Tariq Ali is the author of Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, is published by Verso. His new book, The Duel: Pakistan In the Flightpath of American Power, will be published by Scribner in July. He can be reached at: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Full article at Counterpunch

Open letter from Montreal filmmaker Malcolm Guy to the Rendez-Vous du Cinéma Québecois

With this letter I would like to officially withdraw as a member of the jury for the 2008 Prize of the Alex and Ruth Dworkin Foundation for the Promotion of Tolerance through Cinema (2008 Prix annuel de la Fondation Alex et Ruth Dworkin pour la promotion de la tolérance à travers le cinéma) at the Rendez-Vous du Cinéma Québecois.

For those who may not be aware, this prize, which includes a grant of $5000, "goes to a producer representing the production team which has best demonstrated, in the winning work, a message of comprehension and tolerance".

I accepted the invitation from the Rendez-Vous du Cinéma Québecois to join this year's jury in good faith. But after examining in more detail the political and financial basis of the prize I must refuse to have my name associated with it. Behind this noble sounding "award for tolerance" hides a story of intolerance, division and discrimination.