August Burns Red Cancel Planned Concert in Israel

A release from the August Burns Red: Please Don’t Play For Apartheid Israel facebook group:

PRESS RELEASE

(May 30, 2011, 6:00 PM)

August Burns Red, a phenomenally popular Christian metalcore band, has just cancelled their June 9 concert in Israel.  “They have no plans to reschedule,” says a reliable source that must remain anonymous.  They cancelled because they do not want to play in Israel.

This comes as welcome news exactly a year to the date after the 2010 Israeli attack on civilians aboard the Freedom Flotilla, in which nine volunteers were killed execution style, and fifty others were seriously injured, one of which remains comatose.

In late Febuary, a Facebook Page titled  “August Burns Red: Please Don’t Play for Apartheid Israel” was created, and in three months the page grew to a seemingly paltry 249 members.  But what was not insignificant was the fact the the August Burns Red official facebook page had over 700,000 members at the time (now over 856,000) and as many know, sometimes searches lead us to places we never intended to go online.  This may account for the fact that statistics on the page asking the band to cancel their gig in Israel peaked at 6,795 active users who visited the page on March 24^th.  Though the page was frequently visited, and the “likes” remained small, more stats showed that the daily posts that asked the band to cancel, and often detailed Israel’s human rights violations, were viewed hundreds of times each.

There is no way to tell how many times the open letter posted on the site was viewed. This letter (also sent to the band’s management), was addressed to each individual band member, (dated April 5) and referred to one of their songs when it asked them to step out of the “Ocean of Apathy.” The letter reminded them that Palestinian musicians and Palestinian Christians, like all Palestinians under occupation, are denied their basic human rights.  The Goldstone Report was mentioned as well and the fact that metalheads living in Gaza would be denied the chance to hear their concert.

The Global BDS Community thanks August Burns Red for standing up for justice and human rights, in the longstanding Christian tradition.

Written by FreeMedia, Austin, Texas on behalf of the adminstrators of the facebook group “August Burns Red: Please Don’t Play for Apartheid Israel.”

By usacbi in BDS Success, Boycott News, Cultural Boycott, U.S. Cultural Workers, U.S. Organizing on May 31, 2011