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An Open Letter to Pete Seeger
An extract from the letter:
Like many of those who have been inspired by your example over the years, both musically and politically, I believe your decision to participate in the so-called “Virtual Rally for a Better Middle East” this November is a serious error, and I urge you, even at this late stage, to reconsider.
You will forgive me if I reiterate some of our mutual history over the past half-century, since I feel that those who read this open letter need to know where I am coming from, and why I hope and trust you can reconsider this catastrophic decision.
Before we met or even corresponded, I was singing your songs, and I still am (only last month, at the baptism of a ten-year-old friend, we all sang The Hammer Song in the Baptist church). In the 1940s, while we were singing Go home Yankee, Yankee go home to the American forces based in Britain, we knew there was another America, represented by John Brown, the heroes of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought and died in Spain, Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie – and, of course, you yourself.
We were inspired by your testimony when you took your banjo to the hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to back down. When they took away your passport, we campaigned for your right to travel, and when you got it back, and came to sing in London, I was proud to welcome you and Toshi into our home to meet some of the leaders of the embryonic British folk music revival, and for you hear us sing.
When my work as a journalist took me to Israel in 1968, you put me in touch with a socialist kibbutz, where I stayed for a few days. That stay, and my travels throughout Israel and the newly-occupied lands of Palestine, began my education in the realities of the situation in the Middle East.
At the time of my first visit, I was a passionate advocate of the right of Israel to exist, as an island of democracy, surrounded by feudal and oligarchic Arab states. My family history was of opposition to anti-Semitism. My mother kicked my uncle out of our house when he made a remark about Jews spitting into Glixmann’s jam, a jar of which was on our tea table. My cousin hitch-hiked to Spain to support the Republican government (we used to tune into Radio Madrid on a short wave radio to hear his voice). We knew people who had been beaten up by thugs at the British Union Fascists Olympia rally, and who had stopped the blackshirts marching in Cable Street.
So you can imagine how horrified I was in 1968 to hear ordinary Israelis speak of “dirty Arabs”, just as Mosley’s fascists used to speak of “dirty Jews”. As a member of the Young Communist League I had been criticised twenty years before by an older comrade for describing the terrorists of the Stern Gang and Irgun Zwai Leumi as Jewish fascists. This was an oxymoron, he said, a contradiction in terms; by definition, a Jew could not be a fascist. (I did not know, then, that the bullets being used to massacre Palestinians and drive the survivors off their land had come from socialist Czechoslovakia.) Only this year, members of the fascist “English Defence League” turned up at a Palestinian festival bearing an Israeli flag; this provocation reminded me of the pro-Zionist medal struck by the Nazis with a swastika on one side and the star of David on the reverse.
Inspired by your stand at Peekskill in 1949, when you challenged the thugs of the Klan and the American Legion to perform, when the EDL threatened to invade our city, we organised a multi-ethnic festival in Bradford city centre which had nearly a thousand people singing and dancing, drowning out the noise of the fascists shouting their race-hate slogans.
All royalties donated to Palestine International Medical Aid.
Like many of those who have been inspired by your example over the years, both musically and politically, I believe your decision to participate in the so-called “Virtual Rally for a Better Middle East” this November is a serious error, and I urge you, even at this late stage, to reconsider.
You will forgive me if I reiterate some of our mutual history over the past half-century, since I feel that those who read this open letter need to know where I am coming from, and why I hope and trust you can reconsider this catastrophic decision.
Before we met or even corresponded, I was singing your songs, and I still am (only last month, at the baptism of a ten-year-old friend, we all sang The Hammer Song in the Baptist church). In the 1940s, while we were singing Go home Yankee, Yankee go home to the American forces based in Britain, we knew there was another America, represented by John Brown, the heroes of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought and died in Spain, Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie – and, of course, you yourself.
We were inspired by your testimony when you took your banjo to the hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to back down. When they took away your passport, we campaigned for your right to travel, and when you got it back, and came to sing in London, I was proud to welcome you and Toshi into our home to meet some of the leaders of the embryonic British folk music revival, and for you hear us sing.
When my work as a journalist took me to Israel in 1968, you put me in touch with a socialist kibbutz, where I stayed for a few days. That stay, and my travels throughout Israel and the newly-occupied lands of Palestine, began my education in the realities of the situation in the Middle East.
At the time of my first visit, I was a passionate advocate of the right of Israel to exist, as an island of democracy, surrounded by feudal and oligarchic Arab states. My family history was of opposition to anti-Semitism. My mother kicked my uncle out of our house when he made a remark about Jews spitting into Glixmann’s jam, a jar of which was on our tea table. My cousin hitch-hiked to Spain to support the Republican government (we used to tune into Radio Madrid on a short wave radio to hear his voice). We knew people who had been beaten up by thugs at the British Union Fascists Olympia rally, and who had stopped the blackshirts marching in Cable Street.
So you can imagine how horrified I was in 1968 to hear ordinary Israelis speak of “dirty Arabs”, just as Mosley’s fascists used to speak of “dirty Jews”. As a member of the Young Communist League I had been criticised twenty years before by an older comrade for describing the terrorists of the Stern Gang and Irgun Zwai Leumi as Jewish fascists. This was an oxymoron, he said, a contradiction in terms; by definition, a Jew could not be a fascist. (I did not know, then, that the bullets being used to massacre Palestinians and drive the survivors off their land had come from socialist Czechoslovakia.) Only this year, members of the fascist “English Defence League” turned up at a Palestinian festival bearing an Israeli flag; this provocation reminded me of the pro-Zionist medal struck by the Nazis with a swastika on one side and the star of David on the reverse.
Inspired by your stand at Peekskill in 1949, when you challenged the thugs of the Klan and the American Legion to perform, when the EDL threatened to invade our city, we organised a multi-ethnic festival in Bradford city centre which had nearly a thousand people singing and dancing, drowning out the noise of the fascists shouting their race-hate slogans.
All royalties donated to Palestine International Medical Aid.
86 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 29, 2010
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