That’s all it took – a well coordinated campaign that delivered a simple message to the Muezzin and the local leaders in the village of Al Issawiya, near the French Hill neighborhood of Jerusalem: If you don’t stop waking us up at 5 in the morning and disturbing us with unbelievably high Allah-inspired decibels four more times during the day, we’ll hire a special events company with four giant speakers that normally accompany the likes of Madonna and Mick Jagger, and blast you back.
According to Mynet, the residents of French Hill, Har Choma and Pisgat Ze’ev scored a decisive victory in the battle against the muezzin speakers of the mosque without actually having to ever make good on their threat.
The stupendous response their plight and their battle plan was receiving online, and most emphatically right here, at the Jewish Press (some sites were undecided, but we don’t harbor much liberalism when it comes to Muezzin wakeup calls), encouraged the Jewish residents of those three neighborhoods to keep up their threats.
This led to a meeting between the sound-warring sides, a meeting that included the commanding officer of the local police station, the Mukhtar (chief) of Al-Issawiya Darwish Darwish, the Imam of the local mosque, Sami Muchsein, the director of the French Hill Community Administration, Yochanan Bechler, and the Jerusalem municipality’s director of Emergency and Security section Itzik Nidam.
Our understanding is that during the meeting the guy from French Hill went into specific detail regarding the amazing rock concerts his neighbors were going to be treated to starting, say, at 2 every morning. There may have been talk of the effect of the late Jimmy Hendrix could have on a picturesque little village in the mountains.
The last time rock music was used in anger was when President Bill Clinton’s FBI laid a siege on the Branch Davidian compound west of Waco, Texas, in 1993, using loudspeakers to generate high decibel sounds of laughter, birds squawking, sirens, rabbits being slaughtered, rock music, and Tibetan chants.
We have no idea whether or not the above alternatives were used to illustrate what some angry Jewish neighbors who’ve had enough can do with four really big speakers. We do know that in the end Mukhtar Darwish Darwish blinked and promised to remove the speakers that were trained at the Jewish neighborhood.
“We were very afraid that they would direct speakers with noisy music at the neighborhood homes, and also we want to be good neighbors,” he said. “We decided that four speakers are enough.”
If this incident doesn’t teach you everything you need to know about living in peace in the Middle East, nothing will. Over here, the late great President Teddy Roosevelt no doubt would have advised: “Speak Loudly and carry two big sticks.”
