As if it wasn’t enough to have the once-famous novelist Alice Walker publicly claim that the young rhythm and blues singer Alicia Keys will suffer mortal soul decay if Keys goes ahead with her plan to sing in Israel, which Walker and her minions refer to as an Apartheid State, and a huge Internet and petitioning effort to similarly dissuade her, now the national American newspaper USA Today has lent a helping hand.
In a “news article” printed on Wednesday, June 12, USA Today‘s music critic, Steve Jones, cut and pasted nearly the entire press release sent out the day before by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
The press release/news article told USA Today‘s readers that a “delegation representing more than 500 organizations” delivered a petition with “12,000 signatures” to the New York office of Keys’ non-profit Keep a Child Alive which provides support to children and families devastated by AIDS in Africa and India.
The USCACBI petition lists many of the worst-lies-about-Israel-that-Israel-haters-love-to-repeat, such as that Israel is an Apartheid State and that it is a systemic abuser of “Palestinian human rights, and even that Keys’
performance is legitimizing a country that systematically undermines her nonprofit’s mission, that ‘every person has the right to health care and that all children deserve a future.’ Israel routinely denies Palestinians health care and systematically destroys the futures of Palestinian children, denying their rights to education and health care, and regularly arresting Palestinian children and then torturing the vast majority of them.
There is no mention in the USA Today article that Israel routinely treats not only hundreds of Arab Palestinian children and adults a year, but that it does so even for the children of terrorists as well as the terrorists themselves, as any quick Internet search would quickly reveal.
An Internet search that took less than five seconds produced information that more than 100,000 Arab Palestinians were treated in Israeli hospitals in 2011. More than 4 million other results also showed up for the simple search “Israel treats Palestinians hospitals.”
Incidentally, that same search revealed that more than 100 Arab Palestinian doctors work in Israeli hospitals – there goes the Apartheid lie, for anyone who might be interested in truthful reporting.
The USA Today article does not put quotes around the following, which is in Jones’s “article”:
In response to Israel’s large-scale abuses of Palestinian rights, Palestinian Civil Society launched a call for a global campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel in 2005, modeled on the call by black South Africans for a boycott of apartheid South Africa that helped bring an end to the racist system.
The press release/USA Today article goes on to recount the names of other artists who have been successfully intimidated – eagerly or otherwise – into believing the worst about Israel and who have cancelled their performances in Israel.
Columnist Jeffrey Goldberg was apparently the first to notice the similarity between the press release and the article, and tweeted it on Thursday. The Algemeiner also took note.
Thus far Keys has remained firm and plans to perform in Tel Aviv on July 4. There are some social media efforts to support Keys in this position, including this Facebook page, “Alicia Keys Plays for Peace in Israel,” and an inspired effort by a New Jersey woman described in an earlier Jewish Press article, urging supporters to buy Keys’ music worldwide on the day of her Tel Aviv concert.