Media Watch 19 November 2023
The sweet faces of children make an incongruous accompaniment to the genocidal lyrics of the so-called Friendship Song 2023.
“Autumn night falls over the beach of Gaza, planes are bombing, destruction, destruction,” the children sing in angelic voices. “Within a year we will annihilate everyone, and then we will return to plow our fields.”
The lyrics were translated for The Electronic Intifada by independent writer and filmmaker David Sheen and you can watch a subtitled video of the song above, or in the tweet below:
Incitement to genocide is a crime
Kan, the Israeli broadcaster, posted the full video of the song on its X account on Sunday but deleted it a short time later amid an outcry from Israeli and other users.
Some expressed concern that it would help “Hamas propaganda,” while others appeared genuinely disgusted by the video’s violent and genocidal messages.
An archived copy of the now-deleted Kan tweet can still be found online. Kan also deleted a page featuring the song from its website but that too is archived.
Israeli broadcaster Kan shared the so-called Friendship Song 2023 and later deleted it.
The now-deleted page on Kan’s website was headlined, “Love sanctified by blood: The children of the Gaza envelope re-record The Friendship Song.”
It is unclear why Kan removed the video, but it is possible that someone there was concerned that it could make the channel complicit in genocide.
Two decades ago, officials of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines were convicted by an international tribunal for incitement to genocide for broadcasts promoting the extermination of Tutsi people in Rwanda nine years earlier.
The song and video were originally created by Ofer Rosenbaum a so-called “crisis-communication expert” who heads a public relations firm called Rosenbaum Communication.
PR firm for ethnic cleansers
The video was published by “The Civil Front,” an organization run by Ofer Rosenbaum that purports to rally the Israeli homefront in support of the war on Gaza.
In 2020, Rosenbaum was responsible for a billboard campaign in Tel Aviv depicting Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh kneeling on the ground blindfolded, under the slogan “Peace is only made with defeated enemies.”
The client for this campaign was the Israel Victory Project, a cutout of the Middle East Forum, the organization run by notorious anti-Muslim agitator Daniel Pipes.
The Israeli Victory Project is currently promoting the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.
Rosenbaum claimed later to regret this decision, albeit only after the effort to stop Leifer’s extradition failed in 2021.
In August, Leifer was sentenced by a court in Melbourne to 15 years in prison for raping and sexually abusing two girls.
Using children to promote a message of genocide is another form of abuse.
“The Friendship Song 2023”
Lyrics by Ofer Rosenbaum and Shulamit Stolero
First Stanza:
Autumn night falls over the beach of Gaza
Planes are bombing, destruction, destruction
Look the IDF is crossing the line
to annihilate the swastika-bearers
In another year there will be nothing there
And we will safely return to our homes
Within a year we will annihilate everyone
And then we will return to plow our fields
Chorus:
And we will remember everyone
the pretty and the pure
We will never let our hearts
forget a friendship like that
Love sanctified with blood
You will return and bloom amongst us
Second Stanza:
We have now run out of words
Our soul still cries out
Our soul not only sings
Today our soul also fights
One people
The people of forever evermore
We won’t stop protecting our homes
We won’t be silent
We will show the world
how today we destroy our enemy
Chorus repeats
Lyrics translated from Hebrew for The Electronic Intifada by David Sheen.
Comments
Wow, that is really insane.
Permalink Lukacs replied on
Wow, that is really insane.
by any measure, a sickening display of hatred
Permalink tom hall replied on
Thank you to David Sheen and the Electronic Intifada for providing the subtitles to this fascist anthem. The use of children by the video's producers is especially noteworthy. Israel is always complaining about Palestinian schoolbooks that supposedly inculcate hatred for Jews. This little item will hopefully find an audience among some in the west who remain susceptible to hasbara. If you want to know who's cultivating hatred in the minds of children while carrying out the wholesale murder of their peers- "human animals" in the language of Israel's defense minister- just sit through this video two or three times.
Finally, to enlist children in such an exercise summons inevitably the cultural memory of another time, another place, a similar regime. I don't know how the mothers of these singers feel about seeing their sons and daughters recruited for a performance the rest of the world and human posterity will regard as desperately shameful. But I know how at least one mother, thanks to Brecht and Eisler, came to regard her contribution to the glory of the exterminators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The Zionist Mother
Permalink Angel Raviv replied on
The big difference between the German mother and the Zionist mother is their upbringing - AKA How many generations of brainwashing have they done through.
A zionist mother was being nurished by hate of "the other"while still in the womb of her mother. A zionist mother was forced to watch films with heaps of corps when she was three and told that is what the world wants to do to her. A zionist mother sent parcels to soldiers at the age of four, sang the originalversion of this song in a choir at the age of five, and at the age of six got to be the solist because she cried at the right time.
A zionist mother was brought up knowing nothing about the rich Palestinian culture nor about the real history of the country in which she lives. A zionist mother was not born a mother, she grew up to be one, knowing only fear, hate, and racism...while being told she is the best.
A zionist mother would have been proud to have her child singing this genocidal song. She herself is too brainwashed to see it for what it is.
Do not take a part with the whole...
Permalink Gunther Gross replied on
At any cultural human system or context you can find a subsystem or a subcontext as expression of the most radical views and attitudes.
This is one more example of that regrettable practice.
not an aberration
Permalink tom hall replied on
There's nothing "sub-" about the system or context of genocidal Zionism. It's plain, overt and flourishing in Israel. The phenomenon of children recruited to sing an anthem of extermination isn't an aberration. At this point it's not even a foretaste of things to come. This is a mainstream sentiment in Israeli Jewish society. I've even seen news videos from previous assaults in which Israeli children gleefully painted their own names with bloodthirsty slogans on bombshells intended for Gaza. Fanatical, murderous pronouncements that wouldn't have been out of place in history's darkest dictatorships fill the air in the Knesset, the media, religious forums- everywhere that opinion is ventilated. And voices calling for a semblance of justice for Palestinians are battered into silence. If you still think there's another, better Israel you're welcome to search for it. But you won't find it in Palestine, under the settlers' whip.
The video wasn't withdrawn because it failed to reflect the true attitude of a majority, but because it did. Somebody in authority simply recognised it was embarrassing to publicly express such a hateful outlook before the world, and to use children for that purpose. But ask yourself, in what kind of society could the idea of that musical performance even arise?
Based upon an old song form 1949
Permalink Angel Raviv replied on
They might have removed it due to copyright infringement
Based upon a famous song from 1949, which is sung on every commemoration day forever... no person who spent their childhood in Israel was not forced to stand still and shed a tear while the song was being sung. Original Lyrics by Haim Gouri and melody by Sasha argov.
https://israelforever.org/prog...
A few tiny translation errors -
It is not
We will never let our heart forget such a friendship
But
Such a friendship will never let our heart forget…
This looks like something
Permalink Anonymous replied on
This looks like something Hitler would have done regarding Jews, Russians or Poles, or Stalin regarding Ukrainians, Kazakhs or Poles. Children singing for extermination. There is scarcely anything more evil.