Very Captivated by Politics

It's most unusual for Arab News to take an interest in young Western singers, especially to the extent of featuring a large photo of them on their front page. But then they clearly consider Sarah Gillespie to be very special indeed:

Singer songwriters come and go in the hedonistic music business, many after a few hits become icons for a short while and then fade out without trace. However, once in a while someone comes along who one knows will play an important role not only in the music world but also be at the forefront of the demand for change, Sarah Gillespie is one such person....

This dark haired beauty’s style of singing and lyrics are reminiscent of a time gone by when singer songwriters like Dylan, Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell stood out from all the hundreds of popular singers who had come and gone leaving little trace or impact.

That is not to say Gillespie is a protest singer, but rather she is singer who is unusually intelligent and reflects the fast paced global environment through her poetic lyrics. Her voice ranges from being soft and sometimes sensitive, but there is also a raw edge there that sometimes indicates anger and maybe even arrogance, which may well be a result of confidence.

The songs and music are an urban mix of different cultures and rhythms, a result of growing up in a melting pot of multiculturalism, which is present day Britain....

So what drives this "dark haired beauty"? What inspires her to speak out?

“I am very captivated by politics; I try to stay constantly aware of what is happening in our world and how it affects all of us.”

“Living in Britain, it is impossible to ignore the effects of the so called ‘war on terror.’ A Jewish man can cultivate his beard to express his faith, but when a Muslim does it he is marked as dangerous extremist harboring murderous ambitions. There is a lot of projection going on. Similarly if a Muslim woman wears a hijab, she is rarely perceived as being proud and devoted to God, she is understood as being oppressed and servile.”

For when Gillespie is not singing songs that reflect love, hope, pain or broken promises, emotions we can all relate to, she is busy writing articles exposing the supremacies she sees as being implicit in Western liberal rhetoric. She says “The mantra of the French Revolution was: ‘Freedom, Equality, Fraternity or death!’ Pragmatically this has now unfolded into its tragic meaning: ‘Be free, equal and secular — or we’ll kill you.’

Indeed - and the mass corpses of the faithful that litter the streets of Britain are eloquent testimony to this. Or else she's talking nonsense.

She explains: “I write because I want to contribute to an awareness of the injustices many people are facing through our government’s actions. If we don’t say anything and keep quite, we remain blindly complicit in this carnage executed in the name of liberty”

Gillespie is a great supporter of the anti-war movement in Britain. However, she also believes that the Left groups, socialists and Marxists could have played a stronger role in preventing the mass onslaught of Islamophobia that is rife in the West.

The mass onslaught of Islamophobia? Well, now you can see why she appeals so much to Arab News.

“I grew up in liberal Britain and while historically the left was aligned with the struggles of oppressed peoples, this proved problematic when it came to Islam. This is because the Left is generally an atheist, feminist movement premised on the western concept of the individual. It celebrates rationality and demeans divinity. Therefore we have British liberals like Nick Cohen or Martin Amis fully endorsing curtailing the rights of Muslims because, paradoxically, they imagine their belief in equality makes them superior. You see the same hypocrisy in the way that feminism is mobilized in the interventionist agenda. Suddenly the left defends or supports the bombing of Afghani women to prevent them from being oppressed by Muslim men. The supremacy is pretty shocking”.

Feminism mobilised in the interventionist agenda? We've been here before.

So who's the producer of Gillespie's latest album? It's Gilad Atzmon, that old favourite at Harry's Place, called here "the famous anti-Zionist musician", but more accurately described by Judeosphere as "rabidly anti-semitic" (well, actually "rapidly anti-semitic", which he may well also be) after his recent reference to the "devastating prophetic reality" of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

A youthful concern with politics is all well and good, but when you side with those who blow up girls' schools in Afghanistan, and choose as a colleague someone who takes the Protocols seriously, it's perhaps time to take a good close look at those progressive credentials again.

Comments

[Noga]

About the Arab world's choice of admired celebrities:

"Israeli journalist, Guy Bechor, writes on the Israeli website gplanet (Hebrew language) that the Arab world is going crazy over reports that Leonardo DiCaprio is converting to Judaism in order to marry Sports Illustrated cover girl, Bar Rafieli, an Israeli.

The report appeared on Al-Arabiya website and, according to Bechor, is quite vicious. Apparently, Leo is a hero in the Arab world (everyone loved Titanic) but that the combination of his relationship with the Jewish beauty, and his conversion, should it happen) instantly transforms him to dirt in their eyes."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mj-rosenberg/dicaprio-to-convert-arab_b_169141.html

I went to Bechor's website where he posted a few comments from the Arab blogosphere, translated into Hebrew. I translated some of those comments to English. Some of them are pretty funny and not all of them are so dumb and hateful.

For example, Nassim says: I wish I were Jewish. I would marry her on the spot. And Pirate responds: Me, too. That girl is worth any price!. Abu el Abd says: Of course he will convert. He is weak and needy and wants a future in the film world which is 100% dominated by Jews. Honestly, there are American girls a million times more beautiful than her, but this is a world of interests...

More translated comments:

Arab Egyptian woman: For sure Raffaeli's father wants to improve the Jewish race.

Another Arab reader responds to the above: What improvement? She is much more beautiful than you...

Muhammad Alkhaldi says: The Jews have been employing this method for generations, to attract men from other religions to Judaism. The Jews need the sex trade in the Occupied territories, too, to attract the Arab youth....It's their policy to use sex...

"Xenophobic Egyptian woman" writes: We Muslims miss nothing if this Capris moves to another religion, Jewish, or even Buddhist. May you prosper in your new religion and your beautiful Jewess. You are all thieves and robbers anyway, sweetheart, and it doesn't matter if you are an American, Catholic or Protestant, American or American Jew. You steal the dreams from poor people... America is the illegitimate father of the Zionist Entity. Maybe we'll get rid of you both, Amen.

Arab Historian: Give half your income to Israel, so it can buy itself a phosphorous bomb, or you'll get to divorce and then you'll have to pay half anyway... haven't they done the same with Clinton and anyone who holds a senior position in the US? They (Jews) are strange being with strange needs which are not acceptable to normal human beings...
________________

This is more than enough to figure out what the general mood is. I think.

http://contentious-centrist.blogspot.com/search?q=Leonardo+de+caprio

[Dom]

"... Martin Amis fully endorsing curtailing the rights of Muslims."

OT, about Amis, did you see this in the Guardian, where he is speaking of his now-deceased sister:

"I wish she had converted to Islam. She might still be alive because of the continence of Islam, the austerity, the demands it makes on you."

Of course he was in Dubai at the time, but really I just don't get him.

[Mick H]

Well yes, that struck me as a fairly odd remark. Maybe he's trying to counter his anti-Muslim image - I really don't know.

[Noga]

“She was such an uncontrollable girl that there was even talk of her joining the army when she was 17 or 18 because we all sensed that she needed a really tight structure, an ésprit de corps of shared belief,” he told The National. “Islam in its way gives you that, a collectivity that she could have been a part of, which incidentally forbade alcohol and premarital sex. She might have had a chance. She would have had to embrace it earlier than she embraced Catholicism.”

This is how he explained it. And it seems an odd sort of tribute to Islam, that its adherents are expected to live in accordance with a military regimen of iron discipline and self-deprivation. Perhaps he was trying to speak to the Dubaians using tropes they could relate to. It's not the first time this usually wizard who can weave magic with words puts his foot in his mouth. His comments about Muslims which gained him the reputation of an Islamophobe were similarly gauche.

I remember him in an interview on Charlie Rose just after his book "House of Meetings" was published telling Charlie the novel is about two brothers who fall in love with the same "Jewess". Charlie was quite taken aback by this term ("Jewess" is really a loaded term to use), and repeated after him: So these two brothers who fall in love with the same Jewish girl..."

[Izzy]

“The mantra of the French Revolution was: ‘Freedom, Equality, Fraternity or death!’ Pragmatically this has now unfolded into its tragic meaning: ‘Be free, equal and secular — or we’ll kill you.’

Indeed - and the mass corpses of the faithful that litter the streets of Britain are eloquent testimony to this. Or else she's talking nonsense.

Izzy: I think you'll find it;s the mass corpses of the faithful that litter the streets of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon provide testimony to this - which is surly Sarah Gillespie's point.

[Mick H]

Well yes, to be fair to Sarah Gillespie I think that is indeed what she meant - though it's difficult to tell. The idea that Western intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan (not sure how Lebanon gets in here) is an attack on Islam is of course precisely the line that al Qaeda and their associates like to peddle. And of course those doing the overwhelming bulk of the killing are not the secularists, but fellow Muslims.

[Izzy]

Do you seriously suggest that the 'overwhelming bulk' of the 1.5 million Iraqi dead were killed by Muslims?

[Mick H]

Oh right. 1.5 million Iraqi dead. It's a waste of time responding to you then, isn't it?