The signs read things like “Decolonize Your Ass,” “Another Jew For A Free Palestine,” and “Israel is Toxic YT Girl Energy,” on a chilly Saturday afternoon in Herbert Von King park in nearby Bed-Stuy. Protests had shut down various thoroughfares in central Manhattan during the week before and the issue was making its way into Brooklyn through a show organized two days earlier by members of a local, self-described “Pan Arab Hardcore” band called Pure Terror. The cause, supporting a ceasefire in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, has quickly become a popular one among local punks; early next month, Pure Terror, a somewhat new band with a debut EP that came out this past July (complete with Ghassan Kanafani samples and field-recorded protest chants from the early Arab Spring) will be opening for scene figureheads Show Me The Body at TV Eye in Ridgewood, a benefit show “to raise funds for the Palestinian Youth Movement and Within Our Lifetime,” the latter the New York non-profit that operates as the political arm of the recent CUNY graduate Nerdeen Kiswani.
“We refuse to be silenced by our own government who is not only complicit, but an active participant in this genocide. We reject fascism, we reject islamophobia, we reject antisemitism, we reject settlement-colonialism, all the way from New York to Palestine,” one of the show’s organizers read out loud from a phone. The flavor of some of the signage pointed to concerns that dated to the early Bush-era; e.g. “All Empires Fall,” or “Black Jews Against Empire” etcetera, but the tenor of the call and response chants of “Palestine will be free,” brought the mind the more recent Occupy protests.
