Walt Secord slams keffiyeh protest
Entertainers Australia-wide have put their names to a protest tomorrow, replicating the keffiyeh wearing on stage, which sparked a bitter dispute between the Sydney Theatre Company and three foundation directors.
Walt Secord
The directors Ruth Ritchie, Jodi Hausmann and Alex Schuman, have since resigned.
The wearing of the Palestinian head scarf at the curtain call of the company’s production of Chekovs’s The Seagull also created a massive outcry from STC’s patrons and donors, resulting in cancellations of 2024 bookings.
Two of the three actors who wore keffiyehs at the end of The Seagull have put their names down for tomorrow’s protest.
The organisers have sent a letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and leading heads of arts organisations, asking them to call for a ceasefire and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.
Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council’s Director of Public Affairs Walt Secord, who also served as NSW Labor Shadow Minister for the Arts from 2015 to 2022, said: “The statement was misguided, inaccurate and riddled with anti-Israel rhetoric including repetitive and tiresome woke phrases like colonialism, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
Any document signing off with the phrase, `From the River to the Sea’, puts itself outside mainstream debate by demanding the destruction of the world’s only Jewish State – and it should not be endorsed by anyone with even genuine respect for peace and human rights.
This is an unsophisticated, crudely sloganistic statement, demonstrating how little those behind it know about the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Worst of all, there is not a single mention of the hostages or those slaughtered on October 7 and there is no condemnation of the terrorist genocidal movement, Hamas – not a word. That failure to condemn these blatant war crimes reveals that one-sided hatred that lies behind the statement.”
So true, Walt. Nobody is interested in these important facts.
Entertainers Australia-wide should make up their minds whether they are entertainers or politicians. They are welcome to have protests and demonstrations, without hate speech, on the streets or in the parks. But if they are performing in theatres or elsewhere and audiences pay to attend performances, then they need to keep their personal political expressions to themselves. It’s completely inappropriate to mix the two.
They don’t even have enough knowledge to have an opinion on the Israel-Palestinian-Gaza situation, but that’s not stopping anyone because crowd mentality has taken over and it’s such fun to join in the hatefest.