The Sweet Sound of Propaganda (Iraqi Orchestra Stunt)

[kskiska]

American bombs destroyed its Baghdad home, but this week the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra jetted into Washington for a glittering public concert. Were George Bush and Colin Powell really there to appreciate the Arab folk songs?

Dreams can be realised in the most surprising of settings and in the most unlikely circumstances.

For Mohammed Amin Ezzat, conductor and composer with the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra (INSO), the moment came on Tuesday night in Washington's Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. There, in front of an audience that included President Bush and the First Lady, and Secretary of State Colin Powell, Ezzat's orchestra made its first ever performance in the United States and its first outside of Iraq for more than a decade.

(snip)

But Bush's comments and the performance of the INSO in Washington have angered many opponents of the war who believe the event was the latest in a series of stage-managed stunts designed to boost the president's domestic ratings. They said the attendance not only of Bush and Powell, but Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers - the chief architects of the invasion that resulted in the death of thousands of civilians - was at best insensitive and at worst an insult to the Iraqi people.

Even the Washington Post, usually a reliable voice of the establishment if not the current administration, smelled a rat. "You've heard of show trials? Well, last night's appearance by the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center was a show concert," said its review of the concert. "The State Department flew 60 musicians the 6,200 miles from Baghdad to Washington to play for less than an hour in tandem with members of the NSO. As Winston Churchill might have put it, rarely have so many traveled so far to do so little."

more…
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=472431

[JailBush]

1. Now here's my idea of a really cool stunt:

The Iraqi orchestra purchases a roast turkey, takes it aboard Air Force One, then delivers it to Afghanistan!

[DuctapeFatwa]

2. Did the orchestra play while the Iraqis were rounded up and marched off

to the Crusaders' "detention camps"?