The invitation to Arab Idol winner Mohammed Assaf to sing at the opening of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil this summer has been rescinded.
Flocked by fans and admirers at a press conference in Gaza City on Tuesday, Assaf said he was prevented from performing at the World Cup 2014 opening ceremony by “states and other actors ‘unknown’.” Assaf also said that Shakira, also scheduled to perform at the opening ceremony, will protest FIFA’s decision by refusing to perform as well.
News publication Emirates 24/7 , of Dubai Media Inc., the official media organization of the government of Dubai, is reporting Shakira, is boycotting the ceremony.
Arab Idol singer Mohammed Assaf says he has been banned from singing at the opening of the World Cup 2014 in Brazil and that the Colombian singer Shakira has decided to boycott the ceremony in protest at the ban,
Assaf, a Palestinian living in Gaza Strip, wrote on his social network page that he has just been notified about the decision cancelling an agreement with him to sing at the World Cup, which will kick off in June.
“I have been banned from singing at the World Cup opening in Brazil by some countries and parties which I do not know,” he said, according to the Saudi daily Sada and other regional newspapers.
“This decision has prompted Shakira to apologize from singing at the ceremony,” he added without giving further details.
The significance of FIFA’s invitation to Assaf, issued directly after the announcement he had won the Arab Idol competition, cannot be over stated. It signaled his talents and meteoric rise that quickly followed were recognized not just within the Arab world but to much wider audiences and the emergence of Assaf on the global stage.
That seems like a long time ago now, especially after his whirlwind North American tour sweeping audiences off their feet. It remains to be seen what kind of pressures will come to bear on FIFA after the news of their disastrous decision permeates the mainstream.
But whatever the outcome one thing is certain, there will be no holding Mohammed Assaf back, his destiny as a global superstar, is already sealed.
Unfortunately Mohammed Assaf was not able to perform in Gaza during his recent visit. Although concerts were planned and approved by Hamas’ Ministry of Culture their Ministry of Interior did not approve the plan.
In other soccer news, the Jerusalem Post reported yesterday that Palestinian Football Association chairman Jibril Rajoub is calling on FIFA to expel Israel for failing to abide by its conventions, and said the PA would ask FIFA for Israel’s expulsion from the organization.
From the Jerusalem Post article, PA to ask FIFA to expel Israel:
“We will demand the expulsion of Israel from FIFA and the International Olympics Committee,” Rajoub told reporters in Ramallah.
He said that the Palestinian demand for the expulsion of Israel would be presented to FIFA during the organization’s next conference in June.
Rajoub also called for international recognition of the Palestinian Football Association as a national Palestinian organization.
He said he would seek the backing of Arab ministers of youths during their upcoming meeting on March 14 for the demand to expel Israel from FIFA.
He said that Iran, Qatar, Oman, Jordan, Algiers and Tunisia have already pledged to back the Palestinian demand.
Rajoub claimed that Israel does not want the Palestinians to have their own national sports entity and seeks to break the Palestinians’ athletic will.
Thanks to Phil Weiss
(Previous Mohammed Assaf coverage on Mondoweiss available here)
Shakira can teach Scarlett a thing or two about class and integrity.
Well, we all know who the unknown parties and countries are! The long arm of Zionism reaches everywhere I see.
Buy Assaf’s music! No doubt FIFA and the IOC should ban Israel until the war crimes, Apartheid/racism cease.
Assaf should request an investigation into the parties involved in sabotaging his invitation to perform at the World Cup. This move to ban Assaf from performing smells vile; like bigotry, envy and pure hate rolled into one.
Assaf should wonder who his friends are:
“Documents published in Electronic Intifada reveal that the Amcha Initiative, a group lead by UCSC lecturer Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and UCLA Professor Emeritus Leila Beckwith, infiltrated and spied on an Olive Tree Initiative (OTI) delegation to Palestine and Israel. One attendee of the July-August 2012 trip, which included students from UCLA, UCSC, and UCI, passed information onto the Amcha Initiative including private Facebook posts made months after the trip. This individual may have broken OTI’s participant agreement by sharing personal information from confidential student reflection sessions. Amcha Initiative members compiled this information in a 30-page document assessing the “threat” they believed OTI posed to the Jewish community. Amcha may have passed this report on to other unknown individuals and organizations.”
https://www.change.org/petitions/university-of-california-board-of-regents-investigate-amcha-initiative-spying-and-intimidation-of-uc-students-faculty
AIPAC’s dual nature has an earlier parallel:
Most party members lived in that public world of American communism. They had no connection with, or even knowledge of, another world.” But there was also a secret world where the party “was also a conspiracy financed by a hostile foreign power that recruited members for clandestine work, developed an elaborate underground apparatus, and used that apparatus to collaborate with espionage services of that power.”
http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page47.html
I am very sorry to hear that an excellent singer like Assaf won’t sing at the opening of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. I hope that Israel is not behind this decision.
Assaf was invited and then disinvited….I guess we can figure out zio pressure was brought to bear either by Israel or Isr Jewish org. in Brazil.
Just look at this other example 0f their petty character below.
Israel refused medical access because Palestine submitted the request on stationary that said State of Palestine.
And Israel claims they support 2 States?
‘Stationery Logo Pits Palestinians Against Israel’
JERUSALEM — The latest skirmish between Israel and the Palestinian Authority does not concern settlements or refugees, but stationery.
Israel rejected the applications of dozens of medical patients in the Gaza Strip seeking to travel for treatment in Israel or the West Bank this week because the paper they were printed on bore the logo “State of Palestine” rather than “Palestinian Authority.”
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, ordered that the state logo be used on all official correspondence shortly after he won the status of nonmember observer state for Palestine at the United Nations on Nov. 29, 2012, over vehement Israeli objections. But Guy Inbar, a spokesman for the Israeli agency that coordinates movement and other activities with the Palestinian Authority, said that it had always refused to accept such documents, and that the Palestinians had generally complied and used the old letterhead.
Now, even as Secretary of State John Kerry is nearing the final stages of brokering a framework for continuing fragile peace talks that started last summer, each side is accusing the other of turning a piece of paper into a political provocation.
“We know that they have two kinds of documents,” Mr. Inbar said. “Sometimes they send us, by mistake or in order to challenge us, the State of Palestine signature.”
Omar al-Nasser, a spokesman for the Palestinian Health Ministry, countered, “This is pressure for political reasons.”
Caught in the middle was a 13-year-old boy, Salah Abu Assi, who has been traveling to Jerusalem for chemotherapy at Hadassah Medical Center as often as four times a month for three years. Salah’s father, Hammad Abu Assi, a pharmacist in Gaza City, said that the boy has a tumor behind his eye. A Palestinian Authority liaison informed family members on Tuesday night that they would not be allowed to leave Gaza through the Israeli-controlled Erez crossing to make their Wednesday appointment, Mr. Abu Assi said.
“We did not sleep last night after we learned about the problem,” he said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “We are afraid that the progress he has made in recent months will backfire and his condition deteriorate.”
Sari Bashi, the executive director of Gisha, an Israeli group that advocates access to Gaza, said an average of 1,038 medical patients crossed through Erez each month in the second half of 2013, a 32 percent increase since Egypt’s new military-backed government clamped down on Gaza’s southern crossing, Rafah. Ms. Bashi questioned the consistency of Israel’s policy, saying that a medical report her group submitted recently was approved despite bearing the state logo. She called the situation “very problematic.”
“Refusals or even delays over an irrelevant issue like the logo on a medical report can cost lives,” Ms. Bashi said.
But Mr. Inbar said urgent cases were processed quickly. After his agency returned about 70 applications submitted Sunday on the new “state” stationery, he said, the Palestinians refiled about two dozen of them on the old “authority” letterhead, and all of those were approved.
“In very short time we examined those applications,” Mr. Inbar said. “The other cases we are still waiting for them to send us the application as it used to be, and as our policy says.”…………http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/world/middleeast/even-a-stationery-logo-pits-palestinians-against-israel.html?_r=0
Once I tried to have a Blue Jay say ‘Hi’ every morning I went out for a jog… For one reason or another, it never did. Oh well, birds… I also stopped talking to weed in my attempts to verbally coerce it into growing on my neighbor’s soil by pointing out that ‘Hey, dudes, the grass is much greener over there!’
It is always about silencing, isn’t it? Isn’t that a fireproof way to spot zion’s tentacles trying to strangle yet another voice of reason?
@- Annie
Google is a company that makes a boatload of money. It needs ‘you‘ to do so and buy this. Your [google] ‘history’ thus becomes your [google] ‘future.’