Alice Walker Pens Open Letter To Alicia Keys Suggesting Israel Concert Boycott
Famed author Alice Walker is joining the growing number of artists and public figures who have chosen to boycott Israel due to their increasingly violent opposition towards the people of Palestine.One artist who has not yet joined the anti-Isreal movement is R&B songstress Alicia Keys, who is currently scheduled to perform there in the near future. Alice Walker recently penned an open letter to Alicia, informing her of the situation between Isreal and Palestine before suggesting that she join her peers and cancel her performance.
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“Dear Alicia Keys,
ReplyDeleteI have learned today that you are due to perform in Israel very soon. We have never met, though I believe we are mutually respectful of each other’s path and work. It would grieve me to know you are putting yourself in danger (soul danger) by performing in an apartheid country that is being boycotted by many global conscious artists.
You were not born when we, your elders who love you, boycotted institutions in the US South to end an American apartheid less lethal than Israel’s against the Palestinian people. Google Montgomery Bus Boycott, if you don’t know about this civil rights history already. We changed our country fundamentally and the various boycotts of Israeli institutions and products will do the same there. It is our only nonviolent option and, as we learned from our own struggle in America, nonviolence is the only path to a peaceful future.
If you go to my website and blog alicewalkersgarden.com you can quickly find many articles I have written over the years that explain why a cultural boycott of Israel and Israeli institutions (not individuals) is the only option left to artists who cannot bear the unconscionable harm Israel inflicts every day on the people of Palestine, whose major “crime” is that they exist in their own land, land that Israel wants to control as its own. Under a campaign named ‘Brand Israel’, Israeli officials have stated specifically their intent to downplay the Palestinian conflict by using culture and arts to showcase Israel as a modern, welcoming place."
On the other hand the blood money comes in large amounts. Greed versus compassion: place your bets, messieurs-dames.
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