Hip-hop concludes Palestine Week

Media Credit: DTH/Nicolas Gullett
The Iron Sheik, a Palestinian-American writer, activist
and hip-hop artist performs in the Great Hall on Saturday.

The culmination of Palestine Week at UNC wasn't a keynote address by a renowned politician and wasn't a lecture by a tenured professor in the history department. It wasn't even a vigil marked by a candlelit Polk Place.

But the event's organizers and performers would argue "Hip-Hop for Palestine," a concert that took place Saturday night in the Great Hall, was perhaps the best way to tie the week's events together.

One performer who hoped to prove that notion was Jacob Winterstein, a 21-year-old senior at Temple University. When he took the stage, Winterstein, born and raised Jewish, elicited powerful emotional responses from a crowd of more than 100 people.

"I like to provoke people," Winterstein said. "I hope I'll say something tonight that makes someone mad or happy or want to start a conversation about the issues."

Winterstein's performance poetry, he said, is the one way he believes he can best make his voice heard on issues such as Israel's oft-disputed occupation of Palestine, which was the focal point of Palestine Week.

"Please don't be indifferent," he said. "I want the end of these three minutes to be the reason for something else to begin."

And Winterstein, like all of Saturday's performers, said hip-hop is a dynamic and relevant method of both bringing specific issues to the attention of students and encouraging them to explore activism in general.

"When you add things like rhythm, rhyme, metaphors, analogies, intonation and speed, people hear things differently than if you tell it to them in a conversational way," he said.

That theory seemed to ring true, as the crowd collectively nodded, groaned and applauded with approval after powerful moments during Winterstein's performance.

But content is just as important as delivery, and Tarik Kazaleh, aka Excentrik, who also performed, followed a different path in compiling his message.

Kazaleh, a Palestinian brought up as an Eastern Orthodox Christian in the Bay area of California, said performers must be careful when dealing with issues pertaining to religion and ethnicity.

"I'm a savage secularist," he said. "If you're an extreme religious person, get out of my face."

So instead, Kazaleh said he relates events from his past in the context of his personal theology.

"It can be hard to fit in when you're automatically some kind of terrorist Arab," he said. "It's like a tub of those big Legos, and you're the Lincoln Log that got in there and doesn't belong."

But Kazaleh didn't pretend to conform to political correctness, and his set was interspersed with chants such as "Bye bye Bush" and "Oh! Bama! Oh! Bama!"

The last performer, Kevin James, aka Son of Nun, was perhaps the most effective in ensuring the continuation of discussions about the occupation of Palestine and the United States' role therein.

James stood in the middle of the crowd for his entire set, rapping about issues including the execution of Stanley "Tookie" Williams, founder of the Crips gang, and Hurricane Katrina, in addition to the situation in Palestine.

And James said he thinks both Saturday's show and the week as a whole were effective in encouraging further discussion of the role of U.S. foreign policy in Palestine .

"From what I've heard about the week this far, it's resulted in people taking sides on Palestinian issues," he said. "People are learning what their opinions should be because they've seen these issues addressed in this way."

-- Bennett Campbell, Daily Tar Heel
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2/4/08