Israel and the Black Panther Party, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #182

August 9, 2010 Mike Gold 8 Comments

I don’t know how I missed this one, and I’ve missed it for almost 30 years now. I didn’t know that there was a Black Panther party in Israel.

This Black Panther party was organized in 1971 as an Israeli protest movement of second-generation Sephardic Jews whose parents had emigrated from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, and were subjected to routine discrimination and oppression. They chose the name after activist and educator Angela Davis came to visit Israel to meet with the protest movement, who then copped the name. Their movement lasted until about the mid-90s.

To save you a Google: there are many different types of Jews. One way to divide them (but get there fast; Jews suffer from mitosis) is from point of origin: Sephardic Jews are of Spanish / Portuguese descent. They retain their own distinctive customs and rituals, preserving Babylonian Jewish customs and traditions rather than the Palestinian ones of the other crowd, the Ashkenazim. Ashkenazi-Americans like myself tend to be of Eastern European origin. Our own Martha Thomases maintains a lot of Ashkenazi-Americans, again, like myself, are atheists who relate to the culture if not the dogma, and I think she’s right about that. I only know a few Sephardic-Americans, but my impression is that they are proportionately more religious.

Why is this of interest today? It turns out that Yisrael Bundak, one of the Israeli Black Panthers’ former leaders, was just sentenced to 18 months in prison for operating a pirate radio station that played Middle Eastern music. Not Muslim music, not anti-Israeli music… just music from their homelands. Jewish music, in a sense.

I don’t know why they couldn’t run the station on the Internet, like we do at www.getthepointradio.com (check out all that italic copy at the bottom of this and every other column, while I say a silent prayer to Crom for the creation of copy-and-paste). Be that as it may, operator Bundak says he is being personally hounded because of his membership in the old Black Panthers movement. He says he’s simply a musician trying to get the music of his heritage played in public.

I say 29 years is a long time, particularly since Israel was wrong in the first place. Jews discriminating against Jews is truly stupid and hypocritical; these clowns must get over it.

It gets increasingly hard to feel sympathetically towards the nation of Israel. I can’t support a country that so blatantly opposes Freedom of Religion and Free Speech. Of course, I what do I know? I’m the type that capitalizes Freedom of Religion and Free Speech.

As a person with the last name of “Gold,” the existence of the nation of Israel makes my life easier. Such is true for all diasporic peoples, including Africans and the Romanies, also known as Gypsies. That latter group had been nearly completely decimated by the Nazis in their concentration camps.

Sadly, it’s getting harder to distinguish Israel from its neighbors. As a battle cry, Israel Uber Alles sucks.

Media metaphysician and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times). Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue.