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Nova Music Festival Massacre ‘Being Forgotten and Ignored,’ Says Jewish Music Executive After NY Exhibit Opens
Scooter Braun, left, pointing out bullet holes on a portable bathroom stall that is featured in the new exhibit “Nova: Oct. 7 6:29 AM, The Moment Music Stood Still.” Photo: Screenshot
A new exhibition in New York City that features items and firsthand videos from the Hamas terrorist attack at the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7 is not meant to be political and sets out to ensure that the massacre is remembered, according to organizers of the project.
“I think the events of Nova are not only being forgotten — they’re being ignored,” Jewish record executive and entrepreneur Scooter Braun, who helped bring the exhibit to New York after its 10-week run in Tel Aviv, told CBS’s Sunday Morning. He added that the exhibit has nothing to do with politics and is instead “about music.”
“Why are musicians not screaming from the top of their lungs that music should be a safe place?” he asked. “Just stop for a minute and ask yourself, on either side, do kids dancing deserve to die? And the answer is no. So just give [the exhibit] an opportunity and have empathy in your heart for all sides.”
The exhibit, titled “Nova: Oct. 7 6:29 AM, The Moment Music Stood Still,” takes a venue over 50,000 square feet near the 9/11 Memorial in downtown Manhattan and attempts to recreate the scene of the deadly terrorist attack at the music festival.
Artifacts taken from the site of the Hamas massacre are featured in the exhibit, including bullet-riddled bathroom stalls, scorched cars, signage, attendee tents, and personal belongings left behind such as shoes, clothes, and hats. The exhibit also highlights testimonies from survivors of the terrorist attack and a photo gallery of those murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7. Over 360 festival-goers were killed by Hamas that day and more than 40 others, including American citizens, were taken as hostages back to the Gaza Strip.
Braun told Sunday Morning he wanted to help bring the exhibit to New York City because he was outraged by the silence surrounding the Nova massacre. He said the international community has condemned concert massacres in the past — including the 2017 attack at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas and the bombing outside an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, that same year.
“Yet, the Nova festival had over 360 people killed, over 40 taken hostage. It’s the biggest massacre at a music festival in history and no one was saying anything,” Braun noted. “I just felt like I needed to do something.”
Nova survivor Daniel Dvir, 23, who hid from Hamas terrorists in a tree, also spoke to Sunday Morning, as did Hannie Ricardo, the mother of 26-year-old Nova victim Oriya Lipman Ricardo. Hannie talked about her daughter and other victims of the attacks saying, “They were radiant people, happy people. And they were butchered, massacred, raped, mutilated by monsters.”
“It was a wakeup call for the Jewish people,” she added. “We had to go to Gaza, to take care that we won’t be massacred again.” When asked about the Gazans affected by the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas terrorists controlling the Palestinian enclave, she said, “I don’t appreciate any loss of life, but if a terrorist hides behind them, what can we do?”
“Nova: Oct. 7 6:29 AM, The Moment Music Stood Still” is located at 35 Wall Street in New York City. It opened to the public on April 21 for a four-week long presentation.
The post Nova Music Festival Massacre ‘Being Forgotten and Ignored,’ Says Jewish Music Executive After NY Exhibit Opens first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Sweden Ends Funding for UNRWA, Pledges to Seek Other Aid Channels
View of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash90.
i24 News – Sweden will no longer fund the U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) and will instead provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza via other channels, the Scandinavian country said on Friday.
The decision comes on the heels of multiple revelations regarding the agency’s employees’ involvement in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza.
Sweden’s decision was in response to the Israeli ban, as it will make channeling aid via the agency more difficult, the country’s aid minister, Benjamin Dousa, said.
“Large parts of UNRWA’s operations in Gaza are either going to be severely weakened or completely impossible,” Dousa said. “For the government, the most important thing is that support gets through.”
The Palestinian embassy in Stockholm said in a statement: “We reject the idea of finding alternatives to UNRWA, which has a special mandate to provide services to Palestinian refugees.”
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel thanked Dousa for a meeting they had this week and for Sweden’s decision to drop its support for UNRWA.
“There are worthy and viable alternatives for humanitarian aid, and I appreciate the willingness to listen and adopt a different approach,” she said.
The post Sweden Ends Funding for UNRWA, Pledges to Seek Other Aid Channels first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Pope Calls Gaza Airstrikes ‘Cruelty’ After Israeli Minister’s Criticism
Pope Francis waves after delivering his traditional Christmas Day Urbi et Orbi speech to the city and the world from the main balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, December 25, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Yara Nardi
Pope Francis on Saturday again condemned Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, a day after an Israeli government minister publicly denounced the pontiff for suggesting the global community should study whether the military offensive there constitutes a genocide of the Palestinian people.
Francis opened his annual Christmas address to the Catholic cardinals who lead the Vatican’s various departments with what appeared to be a reference to Israeli airstrikes on Friday that killed at least 25 Palestinians in Gaza.
“Yesterday, children were bombed,” said the pope. “This is cruelty. This is not war. I wanted to say this because it touches the heart.”
The pope, as leader of the 1.4-billion-member Roman Catholic Church, is usually careful about taking sides in conflicts, but he has recently been more outspoken about Israel’s military campaign against Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
In book excerpts published last month, the pontiff said some international experts said that “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide.”
Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli sharply criticized those comments in an unusual open letter published by Italian newspaper Il Foglio on Friday. Chikli said the pope’s remarks amounted to a “trivialization” of the term genocide.
Francis also said on Saturday that the Catholic bishop of Jerusalem, known as a patriarch, had tried to enter the Gaza Strip on Friday to visit Catholics there, but was denied entry.
The patriarch’s office told Reuters it was not able to comment on the pope’s remarks about the patriarch being denied entry.
Israeli officials were not immediately reachable for comment on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, and the Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The post Pope Calls Gaza Airstrikes ‘Cruelty’ After Israeli Minister’s Criticism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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IDF Pledges to Implement Lessons from Failure to Intercept Houthi Missile
Iranian-backed Yemeni terrorist leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi. Photo: Screenshot
i24 News – The Israeli military said on Saturday that while the investigation into the failure to intercept the missile that hit Tel Aviv early in the morning was still ongoing, some lessons were already being implemented. The ballistic missile, fired by Yemen’s Houthi jihadists, landed at a playground in a residential area, leading to 16 people sustaining injuries from glass shards.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson said that “some of the conclusions have already been implemented, in regards of both interception and early warning.”
The spokesperson added that “no further details regarding aerial defense activities and the alert system can be disclosed due to operational security considerations.”
The Houthis have repeatedly fired drones and missiles towards Israel in what they describe as “acts of solidarity” with Palestinians in Gaza.
The post IDF Pledges to Implement Lessons from Failure to Intercept Houthi Missile first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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