This is the perfect example of how an uninformed public can be brainwashed into hating Israel by being shown only one side, and a very prejudiced one at that, of a complex situation. There is no mention of terrorist attacks, or suicide bombings against Israel in the exhibitions and the public has no way of knowing that it is these that have necessitated the construction of the security fence.
Norman & Lola Cohen (Chairpersons“BIG”)
The life size replica
wall at St James’s Church, Piccadilly for Bethlehem Unwrapped.
Richard Millett Dec. 24th 2013
St James’s Church, Piccadilly, in London’s West End has
installed a life size 8 metre tall/30 metre long replica of Israel’s security
wall in its courtyard as part of its Bethlehem Unwrapped festival. The replica wall is so
vast that it obscures the Church itself.
The replica wall will
be lit up at night and for the next twelve days of Christmas (until 5th
January) a montage of images and slogans will be continuously projected onto
it. Scenes include parts of London with a wall passing through it.
What you won’t see projected onto the replica wall are scenes of
bombed out Israeli buses, hotels, pizza restaurants, bars and nightclubs that
were ubiquitous in Israel before the wall.
Bethlehem Unwrapped has evening
events with anti-Israel polemicists including comedians Jeremy Hardy and Ivor
Dembina, musician Nigel Kennedy, columnists Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Mark Steel, Jeff Halper
of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and War On Want’s in-house poet
Rafeef Ziadah.
Maybe Ivor Dembina will reprise his notorious Holocaust “joke” in which he mocks the Jewish
people for wanting to hog the Auschwitz limelight. According to Dembina Jews
don’t really want others to know that gays, gypsies and the disabled were also
murdered at Auschwitz because we like to see it as “Ourschwitz, not
Yourschwitz”.
Had someone made a joke about, for example, Srebrenica they
would rightly be excluded but Dembina, host of the Hampstead Comedy Club, is
one of the star turns at Bethlehem Unwrapped.
Or maybe poet Rafeef Ziadah will reprise her praising of Islamic Jihad chief Khader Adnan. Adnan, you may recall, is
keen to incite Palestinians to become suicide bombers and blow up innocent
Israeli children.
Unbelievably, into this political hatefest have stepped the
supposedly “non-political” chefs Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi.
They will be hosting the “Bethlehem Feast” at the church on Friday January 3rd.
Last night’s unveiling
of the replica wall was introduced by St James’s Church Rector Lucy Winkett.
Rector Winkett said the reason behind the replica wall was that
when 20 of them visited Israel and the Palestinian territories in October “one
of the lasting memories of our time there was this wall” (see clip).
It is a shame Rector
Winkett didn’t also visit the graves of Israeli children murdered by
Palestinian suicide bombers or Israelis left disabled by them.
The microphone was then handed to Jeff Halper of Israeli
Committee Against House Demolitions who left those who made it to the church
despite the dreadful weather conditions in no doubt as to what the next twelves
days of Bethlehem Unwrapped had in store. Halper has previously expressed his wish to boycott Israel out of
existence.
Last night Halper
described Israel’s security wall as a “very deadly barrier that people cannot
pass” and said “this wall is not built for security…it doesn’t protect Israelis
in any way”. He continued “the wall defines the borders of the Israeli
bantustan that is being created for Palestinians in an apartheid state…it
defines those cantons in which Palestinians will be confined”
