David Draiman, the frontman of Disturbed, walks against the stream of media coverage on Israel
December 25, 2014
Christmas is all about family coming together, and for David Draiman it is the time of high concern with the life of his Jewish relatives and his people. Draiman’s brother, grandmother and 200 other relatives are residing in Israel. David was brought up and raised in an orthodox Jewish family and has always been proud of his Jewish roots. “I can’t deny my upbringing. I can’t deny my heritage. I’ve always been very proud to express my heritage and have worn my emotions and my thoughts on my sleeve”, he admits. “We’ve always been under the microscope, we’ve always been subject of presecution and to all sorts of hardships.”
In an exclusive interview to the Voice Of Israel David expressed his standpoint on how biased media coverage is these days on Israeli conflict issues (listen to the interview below).
“I’m all about freedom to go ahead and practice whatever kind of religions you want, have whatever sort of sexual preference you want, freedom in terms of being pro choice for women… I support liberty, I support true freedom. And so, these entities, whether it’s CNN or Reuters or BBC, or any of the number of news sources that are just so unbelievably biased and who jump at the opportunity to chastize and crucify Israel every chance they get while ignoring and making excuses for every single transgression and every single war crime committed by these terrorists, committed by these inhuman creatures, who think that it’s okay, and who praise and who cheer and who call martyrs the individuals who have the audacity and the cowardice to enter a synagogue and kill some of the pillars of Judaism is just completely reprehensible.”
At the same time, David underlines that he sympathizes not only with the loss of Jews’ lives, but any human lives the war takes. “As much as I mourn for a Jewish child who has to run to the bomb shelter on a regular basis for fear of rocket attacks, I also mourn for the Palestinian child who is bred into a life of terrorism, who is taught, from the minute they’re born, to hate, with propaganda, with media that is laden with hatred. And they are taught to be these instruments of jihad and martyrdom”.
Draiman doesn’t care much about possible consequences of being so straightforward in Israeli question: “I’ve been an outspoken individual my whole life and certainly even since the Gaza War that preceded it and throughout my career”, he says. As of December 24, news reports announced that Hamas again started strengthening their terrorist positions in the northern sector of Gaza, only four months after the last operation. The on-going building of Hamas blockposts causes disturbance to Gaza people.
Disturbed frontman hopes that organizations like the Amnesty International and suchlike human rights organizations will “do our best to try and call them [mainstream media] out on their nonsense and try and point to actual fact and try and point to the casualty figures”. He also emphasizes that the Palestinian Islamic terrorist organization, Hamas is “doing exactly what they’ve intended all along: they’re playing everyone, and they’re playing the media. And the media loves it, because the media loves to sell fear. They love to sell hatred. They profit off it.”
The musician fears that the mainstream media are building up the hatred which may lead to “the next Holocaust.” “It’s interesting how the media loved the state of Israel and loved our story when we were the underdog”, he continued. “And now we’re no longer the underdog, now that we have the ability and the military might and the intestinal fortitude to always defend ourselves and defend our people and defend our right to exist, they damn us for that, and they condemn us for that.”
The vocalist is thankful for social media support he gets: “Our Facebook page, for example, still gets anywhere from 15 to 25 thousand additional ‘likes’ every week… And if people want to know what’s inside my head, they can go to [my] Twitter page, and if people want to know what’s going on with Disturbed, they go to the Disturbed page, and I try to not mix the two.”
Draiman’s concerns are also expressed in the song “Never Again” from Disturbed 2010’s album “Asylum”, which was devoted to the topic of the Holocaust (listen below). Music-wise, Disturbed went on a hiatus in 2011 and haven’t announced since then if they were planning to come back.
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http://youtu.be/zHFiLQtLPfk
