Activists fail in bid to cancel IPO London concert

[King_David]

By JONNY PAUL , JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT
09/01/2011 05:09

BBC Proms organizer: Invitation was purely musical; protest outside London venue expected.




LONDON - Anti-Israel activists have failed to persuade organizers of the BBC Proms, one of the most revered and wellknown classical music festivals that takes place annually in London, to cancel a concert by the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra.

The IPO concert will take place on Thursday at the prestigious Albert Hall in west London.

Since July, activists have been pressuring organizers to cancel the concert. They told organizers that the IPO is, according to one activist, “a pillar of the Israeli state system and of its cultural propaganda campaign” and “complicit in whitewashing Israel’s persistent violations of international law and human rights.”

Leading the campaign is London School of Economics Prof. Jonathan Rosenhead, chairman of British Committee for Universities for Palestine, a group leading the call for a blanket boycott of Israel. He wrote to Roger Wright, director of the Proms, on July 31 telling him to cancel the concert.

“By inviting the IPO, a pillar of the Israeli state system and of its cultural propaganda campaign, you provide the Israeli government, perpetrator of the Cast Lead invasion of Gaza and of so many other violations of international law and of human rights, with the support that they crave. Cancel the concert!” he said.

“For years now the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been promoting ‘Brand Israel,’ a deliberate PR campaign to divert people’s gaze from what they are doing to Palestinians.

The idea is to craft a new image by focusing on Israel’s cultural and scientific achievements,” the LSE Emeritus Professor of Operational Research added.

It followed a campaign led by PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for Academic-Cultural Boycott of Israel) who wrote to the Proms’ director on July 18 calling on him to withdraw the invitation to the IPO. In the letter they stated that “its services to the Israeli army dates back to the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba in 1948 and the occupations of 1967, and continuing up to the present day.”



http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=236249

[LeftishBrit]

1. Good, but predictable

The Proms organizers were never going to cancel a concert in response to a small group of activists.