Tuesday, December 22, 2009
More stupid boycott tricks. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign succeeds only in depriving Arabs of cultural experience. This is pure self-destruction: BBC: Choir caught in disharmony
It should be a time of unalloyed joy for Tim Brown. The director of one of Britain's most well-regarded choirs is beginning a six-concert tour of Israel this week.
The choir of Clare College, Cambridge, will be singing Bach's Christmas Oratorio with the Israel Camerata Orchestra. But the singers have not, as a choir, been able to perform in East Jerusalem or Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, after a Palestinian protest against the choir's tour of Israel.
The choir has been caught in the passionate arguments over whether Israel should be boycotted.
Tim Brown says he is very disappointed. He had been hoping that the choir could precede its tour of Israel with a visit to St George's Cathedral in East Jerusalem, and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. They had been invited to sing in both locations by the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem.
But that was before the London-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign swung into action. The campaign wrote a letter, signed by more than 200 people, asking that the choir cancel its tour of Israel or risk, in their words, "appearing indifferent to Palestinian suffering".
The Palestinian Authority joined in...
I'm beginning to believe that there may actually be something to the whole climate change argument afterall. All that CO2 in the atmosphere is effecting the normal brain functions of humans because there certainly seems to be a lot of (as charitably as I can put it) incomplete reasoning going around.