So, I’m going to do what I swore I never would, and make a firm prediction. It’s after 11 PM Sunday, February 4, 2024 as I write this, and Harvey Mason, Jr. CEO of The Recording Academy, has just delivered a short speech at the Grammy Awards about the horrendous terrorist attacks of recent years on music lovers peacefully enjoying concerts the world over, from Paris in 2015 (130 dead at the hands of jihadi terrorists) to Las Vegas in 2017 (60 dead at the hands of an “active shooter” of the kind I have repeatedly argued we should regard as a freelance MAGA terrorist), to, yes, the 364 murdered and dozens taken captive by Hamas at the Nova music festival in Israel on October 7, 2023.
To the strains of violins played by Israeli, Palestinian, and other Arab musicians, Mason spoke earnestly of the power of music to bring people together, and of mourning for all the innocent life lost in this war that Hamas started (the last three words are my view, not one Mason expressed).
I have not been on social media since his speech ended, but I know in my guts that the “free-free-Palestine” rage is already boiling. By Monday morning, I predict, the Recording Academy will be the target of frenzied protests: “Harvey Mason, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” An online petition to fire and “cancel” him will already have drawn tens of thousands of signatures. They may well get their way, along with a cringing apology from The Recording Academy. The only Grammy-related hatred that could possibly draw more attention is the Trump-MAGA war on Taylor Swift.
No American or Israeli Jew, apart from a few truly fringe haters, will have any problem with what Mason said, and nor of course could any halfway reasonable, actual supporter of the Palestinians. But this is where we are, eighty years after Nazi-style exterminationist antisemitism was supposed to have been slain forever.
Earlier this evening I enjoyed a night out with my wife and her family in a Washington, D.C. eatery plus bookstore, all bedecked with leftist paraphernalia about Black and LGBTQ civil rights. The wait staff’s uniform T-shirts proclaimed them “resisters.” Coming from a family with generations of left-leaning civil rights activists, I should have felt right at home. But it hit me that to the extent the restaurant staff and the other patrons believed in all this stuff, they almost certainly hated me for my Israeli citizenship and all of us for our Jewishness. They will not stand up for us, most of them, if as seems increasingly likely Trump and MAGA take power in less than a year and start to wreak vengeance on those “disloyal Jews” the Orange Menace has been fulminating against more and more often.
Against all that hate, the power of music to bring us all together? Oh, Mr. Mason, from your mouth to God’s ears!
UPDATE, February 5, 4:30 PM Eastern time: 42,000 “likes” on Elon Musk’s Nazified Twitter for a post condemning Mason for “Israeli propaganda.” Kind of underwhelming for the throw-the-Jews-into-the-sea crowd, but your faithful correspondent has no truck with TikTok, where matters may be worse. I’m only the Nazi dead bird app under various pseudonyms.
Emanuel Goldstein 