Alicia Keys Urged to Cancel 4th of July Concert in Israel

She seems like a beautiful woman, and she's extremely talented, but if she pulls out of her gig in Tel Aviv, she's dead to me.

At USA Today, "Alicia Keys urged to cancel concert in Israel":

A coalition of groups have petitioned Alicia Keys to cancel her July 4 concert in Tel Aviv to protest Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians.

Alicia Keys is being urged to cancel a July 4 concert in Tel Aviv in a petition by Palestinian-American groups signed by more than 12,000 people.

A delegation representing coalitions of more than 500 U.S. organizations, delivered the document to the New York City office of Alicia Keys' non-profit aimed at fighting HIV/AIDS, Keep a Child Alive. The petition asked Keys "to stand on the side of justice and cancel her gig in Tel Aviv, Israel," and to "join us now in the cultural boycott of Israel, and help stop entertaining apartheid."

The delegation met with staff at the organization, who explained that they were aware of the ongoing efforts to encourage Keys' cancellation. Delegates passed along materials that included details of the global boycott campaign and reports from rights organizations documenting Israel's violation of Palestinian children rights, which they confirmed was received by Peter Twyman, executive officer of Keep a Child Alive.

Keys recently told The New York Times that she planned to go ahead with the show, despite letters calling on her to cancel from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic Cultural Boycott of Israel, novelist Alice Walker, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and the Israeli group Boycott! Supporting the Palestinian BDS call from Within.

More at the link, including some anti-Israel propaganda quotes from the boycott sponsors.

And see the Hollywood Reporter, "'The Color Purple' Author Urges Alicia Keys to Cancel Concert in Israel."

Alice Walker has written an open letter to the singer, who is scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv on the Fourth of July.

More at the link.

The letter is here, at the Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, "Open letter from Alice Walker to Alicia Keys."

Added: From Richard Friedman, at the WSJ (and posted at Rightfully Yours), "Alicia Keys, Israel and Civil Rights":

Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has lately garnered more attention for her unhinged political views than for her writing. She has compared Fidel Castro to the Dalai Lama. She refused to allow her book "The Color Purple" to be translated into Hebrew. But perhaps nothing was more off-base—at least morally speaking—than the open letter Ms. Walker wrote in late May to singer-songwriter Alicia Keys. Ms. Walker, writing at the website of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, urged Ms. Keys to cancel a July 4 performance in Israel.

Ms. Walker wrote: "you are putting yourself in danger (soul danger) by performing in an apartheid country." The writer then compared the plight of the Palestinians to that of blacks in the American South prior to the civil-rights movement. "You were not born when we, your elders who love you, boycotted institutions in the U.S. South to end an American apartheid less lethal than Israel's against the Palestinian people."

The analogy is false: "Apartheid" is a more apt description for the systemic discrimination against women across the Arab world than the only democracy in the Middle East. But this comparison is also an insult to the courageous civil-rights activists who risked their lives in Birmingham, Montgomery and elsewhere in the South to attain full rights for black Americans.

What characterized the civil-rights movement was its strict adherence to the philosophy of nonviolence. Even when attacked with fire hoses and police dogs, civil-rights demonstrators courageously refused to retaliate.

The Palestinian leadership, by contrast, for decades has used violence whenever missile attacks or suicide bombers suit its aims. It is Israel that has shown an inclination to absorb punishment, though the country's tolerance stretches only so far before it responds militarily to attacks.

The comparison that Ms. Walker and her comrades in the boycott-Israel movement make to the civil-rights movement is false in other ways...

The whole thing's an epic lie. But readers around here are well aware of that.

RTWT, in any case.