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Artist-activists and their respectable audience

Artist-activists and their respectable audience

The World Music Festival organized by the Sines City Council announces itself this year as “ At FMM Sines 2025, we are once again with Palestine, its artists and its people .”

Let's start with the obvious: since when are Portuguese public authorities supposed to be sponsoring this type of activism? It could be for peace, against war. But no. At the Festival Músicas do Mundo, a Festa do Avante version of sun, beach and djembé, Palestine is the cause. And a recurring cause: “we are with Palestine again” is announced for this year. Judging by the results, it would be better if they had never been there!

Less obvious but equally revealing is the profile of the Palestinian artists invited to the World Music Festival: they are invariably verbose in their criticism of Israel and silent when it comes to talking about the Palestinians and their leaders. One of these artists, Bashar Murad, presents himself as a queer Palestinian artist and activist, which means that Mr. Bashar Murad lives in Israel and other parts of the world (which even gave him the right to tour the Eurovision Song Contest ) where he performs hits such as “ Intifada on the dance floor ” but is very cautious when it comes to setting foot in lands governed by Palestinians themselves, namely Gaza, as there he would risk being promptly sentenced to death for his queer activism by those Palestinian leaders whom he never names, criticizes, much less condemns. As for the 47Souls who gravitate between London and Jordan, they may take advantage of their visit to Sines to finally explain what they think about the attacks of October 7th. After all, no matter how much we read and reread, we still have to deal with the genocide in Gaza (someday the term genocide will have a specific definition for Gaza and will no longer mean the extermination of a people but rather population growth).

Many of these artists, Palestinian and non-Palestinian, who are performing this summer at festivals where they wave Palestinian flags and chant slogans that are more or less criminal — like the 'death to the IDF' chanted by rapper Bobby Vylan at Glastonbury — or fanciful, like the accusations of genocide against Israel during Fontaines DC's performance at the Roskilde Festival, are with Palestine but without being in Palestine, even making a particular point not only of not being in Palestine but above all of being in places, like Europe, that they accuse of not being with Palestine.

Gaza is the latest pretext for the activist moment of the protagonists of the society-spectacle. In other times it was the war in Vietnam, then the missiles in Europe and the nuclear, no thanks ... now it's Gaza. And now, as in the past, after the festival, everyone, united under the words and banners of activism, returns to the comfort of their lives, comforted because they believe they have done something for those peoples/lands/regimes from which they themselves were, are and will be the first to save themselves. The activist-artists and their audiences may know nothing about the lives of those they claim to want to liberate, but they are endowed with a keen survival instinct: they rarely allow themselves to be liberated by the liberators.

Finally, two more notes. The first is about the recognition of the Palestinian State. Since the middle of the last century, there has been a game of recognizing states that did not exist, with the well-known result of several failed states. After all, not only does a state not come into existence because it is recognized, but, in the specific case of the Palestinians, the 18 years that elapsed between the Israelis' departure from Gaza in 2005 and the attacks of October 7, 2023, have shown that when the Palestinians of Gaza had the closest thing to a State that exists, they did not use it to govern themselves but to try to destroy Israel.

As for the World Music Festival, the fact that it is like this doesn't surprise me or make me indignant. I'm just not willing to let my taxes be used for this.

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