While I feel no need to either defend or damn Dylan, I do have to
point out that it was this same Nobel Committee that presented our
very own Prince of Peace, Barack Obama, the Peace Prize. Dylan's
selection, so far as I am concerned, neither adds to or detracts from
his entire body of work. It's a sign of the times when a one time
protester becomes an apologist for the Establishment. I remember the
comments of a reporter who arrived at John Steinbeck's home one mid
day, only to find the great author sitting on his veranda in a
dressing gown, eating a very late breakfast. The reporter asked the
author why he no longer wrote of the poverty and suffering of the
working men and women. Steinbeck told the reporter that he no longer
wrote about the poor because he himself was no longer suffering from
poverty.
Perhaps Dylan has also moved beyond being able to relate to the abject
suffering of an entire people.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/19/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
Bob Dylan's embrace of Israel's war crimes
Michael F. Brown Arts and Culture 18 October 2016
American folk-rock legend Bob Dylan performs in Tel Aviv, on 20 June 2011,
in defiance of a Palestinian call for boycott.
Abir Sutan EPA
Controversially, musical genius Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize for
literature last week.
Even some critics who acknowledged his musical brilliance have argued that
awarding a musician was a step that too dramatically expanded the
definition
of literature. What few dispute is that his music inspired millions in the
midst of the anti-war and civil rights movements.
But there is also a less pleasant, less known side to the artist,
particularly his views on Israel, Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense
League.
In 1983, in The New York Times, Stephen Holden described Dylan's album
Infidels as "a disturbing artistic semirecovery by a rock legend who seemed
in recent years to have lost his ability to engage the Zeitgeist."
Holden asserted that a "stomping, hollering rhetorical tone infuses the two
most specifically political songs, 'Neighborhood Bully,' an outspoken
defense of Israel, and 'Union Sundown,' a gospel-blues indictment of
American labor unions."
"The lyrics suggest an angry crackpot throwing wild punches and hoping that
one or two will land," Holden added.
With its opening lyrics parroting Israel's own narrative of being the
blameless, perpetual victim of Arab violence, "Neighborhood Bully" came
just
a year after Israel's bloody invasion of Lebanon that would claim tens of
thousands of lives:
Well, the neighborhood bully, he's just one man
His enemies say he's on their land
They got him outnumbered about a million to one
He got no place to escape to, no place to run
He's the neighborhood bully
The invasion of Lebanon was a calamitous war, widely opposed even in Israel
where it was likened to the US quagmire in Vietnam.
Yet Dylan sang these words exonerating Israel even after the world had
witnessed the horrifying massacres of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and
Shatila refugee camps by an Israeli-allied militia during the occupation of
Beirut.
Today, the lyrics read like a prelude to the racist nationalism embodied in
the politics of today's Israeli leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu,
Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett.
Deeper into the tune, Dylan betrays an ignorance of the enormous support
given by the US government to Israel, notably the huge influx of military
support provided by the administration of President Jimmy Carter shortly
before the release of the album.
That funding continues to this day with the record-breaking $38 billion in
military aid over 10 years recently negotiated by the Obama administration.
Yet Dylan sings:
He got no allies to really speak of
What he gets he must pay for, he don't get it out of love
He buys obsolete weapons and he won't be denied
Kahane
The equal rights backed by Dylan in the US seemingly have no place in his
politics regarding Israel and its neighbors.
Dylan's challenge to power in the US is transmuted into an embrace of
Israeli militancy because of a flawed sense of reality, perhaps one learned
from Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) and later of
the racist Kach party in Israel.
Dylan's relationship to Kahane and the JDL is not entirely clear, but was
explored by Anthony Scaduto in The New York Times in 1971.
"Dylan's interest in Israel and Judaism led him, over a year ago, into an
unexpected relationship with Rabbi Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense
League," Scaduto wrote.
The singer reportedly attended several JDL meetings and may have given
money
to the organization.
Already in 1971, Scaduto wrote, "Dylan's enthusiasm for the militant Jewish
organization has brought down the wrath of some in the radical movement."
Scaduto detailed this just four years after the Israeli occupation of the
West Bank, Gaza Strip, Syria's Golan Heights and Egypt's Sinai had begun:
"To many young radicals, including Jewish kids, Israel is simply another
one
of those fascist states propped up by a fascist American Government, and
Dylan's fervent support of Israel and his over-publicized contacts with the
JDL are to them a further indication that he has sold out to the political
right he condemned."
Rejecting Palestinian struggle
Dylan's drift away from the anti-war movement over the course of the next
45
years - and his clear embrace of Israel after its invasion of Lebanon - led
to no surprise when he rejected the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS)
movement's call for him not to play Israel in 2011.
The right of return for refugees, the end of the occupation and equal
rights
for all Palestinians - the BDS movement's key demands - would not have
resonated with the man who wrote "Neighborhood Bully."
Ironically, both Dylan and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters performed at the
Desert
Trip musical festival this month.
Today, however, it is Waters who is politically relevant, with his support
of the BDS movement and Black Lives Matter, his blasting of Donald Trump's
racism and his love and support for children wearing "Derriba el muro"
T-shirts - Spanish for "take down the wall."
In front of an audience of tens of thousands of festival-goers in Indio,
California, Waters gave a shout-out to Students for Justice in Palestine:
Both Waters and Dylan are now in their 70s; one has grown over the last 50
years in his willingness to embrace urgent contemporary struggles for
freedom and equal rights. The other has stepped back from vital political
engagements and yet been rewarded with a Nobel Prize.
Today it is no longer Dylan who best embodies the spirit of one of his best
known lyrics:
Yes, and how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
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Bob Dylan's embrace of Israel's war crimes
Michael F. Brown Arts and Culture 18 October 2016
American folk-rock legend Bob Dylan performs in Tel Aviv, on 20 June 2011,
in defiance of a Palestinian call for boycott.
Abir Sutan EPA
Controversially, musical genius Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize for
literature last week.
Even some critics who acknowledged his musical brilliance have argued that
awarding a musician was a step that too dramatically expanded the
definition
of literature. What few dispute is that his music inspired millions in the
midst of the anti-war and civil rights movements.
But there is also a less pleasant, less known side to the artist,
particularly his views on Israel, Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense
League.
In 1983, in The New York Times, Stephen Holden described Dylan's album
Infidels as "a disturbing artistic semirecovery by a rock legend who seemed
in recent years to have lost his ability to engage the Zeitgeist."
Holden asserted that a "stomping, hollering rhetorical tone infuses the two
most specifically political songs, 'Neighborhood Bully,' an outspoken
defense of Israel, and 'Union Sundown,' a gospel-blues indictment of
American labor unions."
"The lyrics suggest an angry crackpot throwing wild punches and hoping that
one or two will land," Holden added.
With its opening lyrics parroting Israel's own narrative of being the
blameless, perpetual victim of Arab violence, "Neighborhood Bully" came
just
a year after Israel's bloody invasion of Lebanon that would claim tens of
thousands of lives:
Well, the neighborhood bully, he's just one man
His enemies say he's on their land
They got him outnumbered about a million to one
He got no place to escape to, no place to run
He's the neighborhood bully
The invasion of Lebanon was a calamitous war, widely opposed even in Israel
where it was likened to the US quagmire in Vietnam.
Yet Dylan sang these words exonerating Israel even after the world had
witnessed the horrifying massacres of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and
Shatila refugee camps by an Israeli-allied militia during the occupation of
Beirut.
Today, the lyrics read like a prelude to the racist nationalism embodied in
the politics of today's Israeli leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu,
Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett.
Deeper into the tune, Dylan betrays an ignorance of the enormous support
given by the US government to Israel, notably the huge influx of military
support provided by the administration of President Jimmy Carter shortly
before the release of the album.
That funding continues to this day with the record-breaking $38 billion in
military aid over 10 years recently negotiated by the Obama administration.
Yet Dylan sings:
He got no allies to really speak of
What he gets he must pay for, he don't get it out of love
He buys obsolete weapons and he won't be denied
Kahane
The equal rights backed by Dylan in the US seemingly have no place in his
politics regarding Israel and its neighbors.
Dylan's challenge to power in the US is transmuted into an embrace of
Israeli militancy because of a flawed sense of reality, perhaps one learned
from Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) and later of
the racist Kach party in Israel.
Dylan's relationship to Kahane and the JDL is not entirely clear, but was
explored by Anthony Scaduto in The New York Times in 1971.
"Dylan's interest in Israel and Judaism led him, over a year ago, into an
unexpected relationship with Rabbi Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense
League," Scaduto wrote.
The singer reportedly attended several JDL meetings and may have given
money
to the organization.
Already in 1971, Scaduto wrote, "Dylan's enthusiasm for the militant Jewish
organization has brought down the wrath of some in the radical movement."
Scaduto detailed this just four years after the Israeli occupation of the
West Bank, Gaza Strip, Syria's Golan Heights and Egypt's Sinai had begun:
"To many young radicals, including Jewish kids, Israel is simply another
one
of those fascist states propped up by a fascist American Government, and
Dylan's fervent support of Israel and his over-publicized contacts with the
JDL are to them a further indication that he has sold out to the political
right he condemned."
Rejecting Palestinian struggle
Dylan's drift away from the anti-war movement over the course of the next
45
years - and his clear embrace of Israel after its invasion of Lebanon - led
to no surprise when he rejected the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS)
movement's call for him not to play Israel in 2011.
The right of return for refugees, the end of the occupation and equal
rights
for all Palestinians - the BDS movement's key demands - would not have
resonated with the man who wrote "Neighborhood Bully."
Ironically, both Dylan and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters performed at the
Desert
Trip musical festival this month.
Today, however, it is Waters who is politically relevant, with his support
of the BDS movement and Black Lives Matter, his blasting of Donald Trump's
racism and his love and support for children wearing "Derriba el muro"
T-shirts - Spanish for "take down the wall."
In front of an audience of tens of thousands of festival-goers in Indio,
California, Waters gave a shout-out to Students for Justice in Palestine:
Both Waters and Dylan are now in their 70s; one has grown over the last 50
years in his willingness to embrace urgent contemporary struggles for
freedom and equal rights. The other has stepped back from vital political
engagements and yet been rewarded with a Nobel Prize.
Today it is no longer Dylan who best embodies the spirit of one of his best
known lyrics:
Yes, and how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
