Armed Israeli police close theatre on first night of Palestinian festival

[Ken Burch]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/24/israeli-police-close-palestinian-theatre


"Armed Israeli police last night tried to halt the opening night of a prominent Palestinian literary festival in Jerusalem when they ordered a Palestinian theatre to close.

The week-long festival, supported by the British council and Unesco, has brought several high-profile international authors – among them Henning Mankell, Michael Palin and Ahdaf Soueif – on a speaking tour of Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Shortly before the opening event was due to begin, a squad of around a dozen Israeli border police walked into the Palestinian National Theatre, in East Jerusalem, and ordered it to be closed.

Police brought a letter from the Israeli minister of internal security which said the event could not be held because it was a political activity connected to the Palestinian Authority.

Members of the audience and the eight speakers were ordered to leave, but the event was held several minutes later, on a smaller scale, in the garden of the nearby French Cultural Centre.

Israeli police were deployed on the street outside."


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So, it's now a terrorist act for Palestinians to get together and talk about reading.

:eyes:

Here's a link to the homepage for this despicably violent literary event:

http://www.palfest.org/

Here's footage of some of the events and the forced relocation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJU7-9r-pVA

[delad]

1. yes, it does seem that the act of being visibly palestinian

is tantamount to terror.

[oberliner]

2. Who claimed the event was violent or a terrorist act?

Your comments accuse the Israelis of making claims that they did not make.

[delad]

3. nobody that i'm aware of

[Ken Burch]

4. It didn't accuse them of stating that

It was a comment on the absurdity of a supposedly "democratic" country ("The Only Democracy In The Middle East") using police to shut down a literary festival. It can fairly lead a person to wonder if the Israeli government is going to start saying that anything Palestinians do is "terrorism", misusing the word like Argentine military junta did in the Seventies and Eighties(read Jacobo Timerman if you want to know about that). But I didn't actually mean that they'd used the "t word" in this instance. At least not officially.

I assume you'll agree that there was no possible excuse for what the Israeli goverment did in this circumstance.