This Week with David Rovics

British members of Palestine Action on hunger strike are close to death, Israel's "ceasefire" is just a continuation of the famine, disease and slaughter Israel continues to deliver to the Palestinian people, and across the west, leaders express their deference to the genocidal killers, ship more weapons, and ban words and phrases that make fascists uncomfortable.

The hunger strike continues
In the British prisons
As the courts refuse
To reach a decision
Will they judge this time
As they have before
That the crime is sending 
Weapons to the war

Because the terrorists here
Are the Zionists
Who’d try to hide
A genocide

It's a holocaust 
And it's happening now
A hundred thousand lives lost
And no one knows how
How many more
Will ever be found 
Under the rubble 
Beneath the ground 

Chorus

The Palestinian people
Beneath plastic sheets
There's no ceasefire, just a famine 
As history repeats
History from the Nazis
Brought down on the holy land
Beside the bloody sea
With an F-thirty-five at hand 

Chorus

As the Israelis go on
With their endless killing spree 
While Egypt plays the pawn
With their new refinery
And throughout the west 
They ban phrases and words
As our leaders do their best
At being completely absurd

Chorus

Members of Palestine Action are being held without bail or trial in England for trying to stop a British-sponsored genocide.  Many are on hunger strike, and the doctors say they are dying, as their organs are beginning to fail due to some of them now going on 6 weeks without eating.  Meanwhile in Australia, they are talking about passing a law to say that the phrase, "globalize the intifada" is hate speech.  Resisting genocide is apparently a very hateful thing to do.  Terroristic, even.

In the aftermath of an event like Bondi Beach, media can play the role of building bridges and finding mutual understanding, or it can play the role of being the propaganda arm for a genocidal regime.

David Rovics is an activist musician who composes songs that educate about historical events, provide political analysis about current events, and raise up people from social movements. His solidarity with Palestinian liberation is deep, spanning his entire musical career. Recently, his entire 50-album catalog on YouTube Music was deleted. Clearing the FOG speaks with Rovics about the retaliation he has faced, some of his recent songs, how platforms like Spotify and YouTube are impacting the music industry, his artificial intelligence band, Ai Tsuno, and calls to boycott Spotify. For more information, visit PopularResistance.org.

Steve Zeltzer and I talked for over an hour about all sorts of interesting things the other day.

On the daily news and information show broadcast out of KPFA in Berkeley, California, every Friday host Dennis Bernstein is joined for the first half of Flashpoints by Sam Husseini to talk about the latest in Israel's genocide. Today journalist Robert Inlakesh and I joined Dennis and Sam to talk about our respective experiences getting blacklisted by YouTube, or in Robert's case, by Google altogether.

The latest David Rovics musical production, Ai Tsuno's eighth album, drops on all the streaming platforms later this month. In this podcast special, Ai Tsuno herself presents a guided tour of Rage Bait, and introduces you to songs such as Pogroms of the Occupied West Bank, Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber, Let's Talk About Sex, They Deleted David Rovics, and the title track.

I had a conversation with Scott Harris on Counterpoint Radio earlier this week. The first half is about news of all my albums being deleted from YouTube Music, and the second half is about the double-edged sword of AI and AI music.

The Labor Heritage Power Hour is a weekly radio show on WPFW in Washington, DC, as well as a podcast. Most of the hour consists of Chris Garlock and I diving deep into the weeds of AI music generation and the future of humanity. It was a great interview to begin with, but then the way the songs were edited in for the final version makes it even better.

The latest chapter in the ongoing saga of David's journey down the corporate Memory Hole.