PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

The Exchange Of Souls
by Johanna Balogh Tuesday, Jun. 05, 2007 at 2:15 PM
nezrada@yahoo.com (email address validated) 724-489-1154 943 Shady Ave Charleroi, Pa 15022

This is a profound musical message that is dedicated to Palestine. It is 10 minutes and 10 seconds long.

audio link: MP3 at 7.0 mebibytes

I am a pianist/composer with truly original works. My aim with the music I have is to make awareness of beauty and truth through music that is the most powerful form of art.
Since my music does not fall into any so called "genre" I am having the most difficult time in finding sponsors. As I am finishing up the details of my upcoming CD entilted: Excange Of Souls, I am looking forward to giving concerts with prose and poetry along with the music. My aim is to create a powerful voice for peace and justice. As an American, I am ashamed of what the US government is doing to the people of the Middle East. I am ashamed how the people of America, by our government are being treated as mere slaves to the evil Establishment. I am compassionate towards the homelessness, the ones without medical benefits, families that must work endlessly with more than one job just to barely make ends meet. I am concerned for the veterans who are ignored.I am concerned about how children are being brainwashed by the mainstream media. I am against television!
I am against the Illegal Occupation of Palestine. My goal is to achieve awareness to people about the horrific conditions these people suffer each and every day.
My hero is Mohammed Omer, an award winning photo journalist from Rafah in the Gaza
Strip. His website is: rafahtoday.org. His truthful message for peace and understanding,so powerful, must reach the ends of the earth. In his young age of 23, growing up in the Rafah Camp, he has only known chaos, death and destruction. When I see young men his age, here in the USA, living a life of parties, friends, laughter, good food, and mindless, thoughtless past times, I feel ashamed of the ignorance and apathy among my fellow citizens!
It is high time for all of us to practice compassion. To stand up against everything that is corrupt. Everything that is demeaning to our morals.
As a musician, a true artist, my voice for peace must be understood, not looked upon as just another ego centered musician trying for fame for the "self." I am about peace! Beauty! Love!

www.myspace.com/johannabalogh

"Exchange of Souls"
by Ruth Seitz Monday, Sep. 03, 2007 at 2:03 AM
ruth.seitz@yahoo.com

This original piano music expresses intensity and endurance, two strong characteristics of the Palestinian people. They have tolerated oppression with grace while awaiting others across the globe to help them regain justice in their occupied land.

Thank you for sharing this music. Anyone who hears it and wants to know more about the realities of Palestine, I invite you to check out a blog that will give you info from a journalist writing from the the West
Bank.apricklypear.com Thanks.

End welfare to the terror state of israel!
by scapegoated jew Thursday, Dec. 27, 2007 at 10:08 AM

stop israeli terror!
Why Zionism Is Racism

Zionism is a racist and irredeemable movement, like Bolshevism, Nazism, and Apartheid.

By Rabee' Sahyoun
Posted: 11 Rabi-u-Thani 1422, 3 July 2001

(Note: This article is a direct response, using the same format, on a line by line basis, to an editorial that appeared in the Montreal Gazette on April 26, 2001, written by Gil Troy, a Professor of History at McGill University.)

On this, the 53rd anniversary of the Nakbe' (the Catastrophe of the Palestinian people), it is all too tempting for friend and foe alike to define Israel, and zionism, solely by the Americans' proclamations of its enlightened democracy. To do so is to miss the normal atrocities that occur in Israel daily, the millions who are under curfew and blockade, starving and brutalized, in the Middle East's only colonized state. To do so is to feign the reality of zionism, a racist and irredeemable movement, that survived the twentieth centuries' other genocidal and seemingly passing revolutions such as Bolshevism, Nazism, and Apartheid.

A century ago, zionism extended Western colonialism to Palestine.

The sad truth is that over a century after its founding, zionism seems to be grander and more honorable than its reality. Arabs have suffered from Zionism's belligerence and exclusivity, and many have blamed the United States, and the West, for this because of their unshakeable support of zionism. Israeli aggression over the past seven months has finally renewed international recognition that zionism is racism.

On this anniversary of the Nabke', it is now up to all Jews to follow in the footsteps of the brave few, and denounce the racist and separatist nature of zionism, while the world should encourage them to do so. The world should not allow the torchbearers of zionism to silence and quell the idealism of these few. No nationalism is pure, no movement is perfect, no state is ideal, but today, Zionism persists as a menace, a militaristic and dictatory movement to me and to most Palestinians. A century ago, zionism extended Western colonialism to Palestine; today, as in the rest of the world, colonialism must be ideologically purged from Palestine.

I believe that zionism is racism, because 53 years after being exiled from their homeland, in defiance of the four Geneva Conventions, UN Resolutions 181, 194, 242, 338, and others, and other multilateral and international human rights conventions, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the disinherited refugees of Palestine, continue to endure merciless punishment from the Zionist entity, most recently in the bulldozing of makeshift homes in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza.

I believe that zionism is racism, because I am a Palestinian, and without recognizing the colonialist component in zionism, I cannot explain its racist character, a western movement uprooting the native peoples of Palestine, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Samaritan alike, a people bound to their land, through centuries of raising orange groves, and herding sheep, lending grace to the Hills of God, historically, religiously and culturally.

I believe that zionism is racism, because it fails to appreciate or acknowledge the Palestinians' ties to their homeland, their love for their historical capital, Jerusalem, and the 53-yar plight they have endured as refugees worldwide, in Europe, in North America, in camps Dheishe, Shatila, Wehdaat and others, never giving up hope or struggle in yearning to return home.

I believe that zionism is racism, because it fails to admit the reality that the minority indigenous Jewish community in Palestine, that lived there for the last two thousand years, was an undistinguishable people from its Christian and Muslim Palestinian brethren, and that the leader of the Jewish community of the Jewish quarter of Old Jerusalem, Rabbi Lamram Blau, stood on the side of his Palestinian brothers and sisters being exiled in 1948.

I believe that zionism is racism because in modern times, the promise of liberal democracy and justice is a double-edged sword, preached by the Western powers, yet only paid lip-service to in the case of Israel, where Palestinian are continuously expelled, ethnically cleansed, and subjugated, and in the cases where they are assimilated, they are granted, limited, if any, civil rights.

I believe that zionism is racism, because in establishing the racially exclusive state of Israel, in 1948, and expelling the indigenous Palestinians from the land, the zionists severed a relationship that people had to the land for over 4,000 years, uninterrupted, since before Abraham.

I believe that zionism is racism, because in building Israel, the zionists were revising history, embracing the notion of racial superiority, an ideology that has empowered them to discriminate, with all of its associated social ills, injustices, and moral bankruptcy.

I believe that zionism is racism because it fails to distinguish between the nationalism of the American, based on multi-cultural harmony, and the racial exclusivity, separatism, ethnic cleansing, and brutality of zionism, that stands in clear violation of the most basic elements of international law and human rights practices, as most recently highlighted by reports issued by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

I believe that zionism is racism because in our world of post-modern identities, I know that we do not have to be "either-ors", we can be "ands and buts" – a zionist and a settler, an American citizen of Polish heritage but a soldier in the Israeli army.

I believe that zionism is racism because it self-propagates itself as a democratic movement. However, a democracy, cannot, by definition, only be representative of one community in a bi-national and tri-religious contiguous geographic area. A democracy cannot exist for one people and not for another. This as called Apartheid in South Africa, and is now called zionism in Palestine.

I believe that zionism is racism, because it espouses an independent and sovereign Jewish state, in a land where there is no Jewish majority. It espouses that such a sovereign state be at peace and harmony with its neighbors without allowing the Palestinian refugees dwelling within their borders, who were expelled from their homes in Palestine by zionist militias, as is clearly documented by numerous sources including the memoirs of David-Ben Gurion himself, to return to their homes, which is a basic human right guaranteed by Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I believe that zionism is racism because it is presented by its champions, from Gil Troy to Elie Wiesel, as a romantic movement, which allowed zionists to reclaim the desert and build a model nation-state. This is racism at its most acute, since there was no desert in Palestine, other than the Negev in the South. This is simply a myth that has been propagated by racists who have supported Israel for the last 53 years, and economic data on agricultural exports to Europe from Palestine dating to medieval times easily rejects and exposes this as a blasphemous claim.

Yes, it sounds far-fetched today. But as Vladamir Jabotinsky, father of revisionist zionism said in a racist boast in 1923, "There can be no discussion of a voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs… Any native people…view their country as their national home… They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner… Colonization can have only one goal. For the Palestinian Arabs this goal is inadmissible. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible… colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population - an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy."

And thus, Gil Troy and zionists abound are exposed as nothing more than unabashed racists.

[Mr. Rabee' Sahyoun is a economic development policy researcher, human rights activist, and columnist residing in Beirut, Lebanon. He is affiliated with the global grassroots Palestine Right To Return Coalition.]
for real