Benny Medina, manager for actress and singer Jennifer Lopez, told Israel’s Channel 12 that “nothing was going to stop” them from performing in Israel.
Lopez is scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv on Aug. 1 as part of her “It’s My Party” tour. Activists in the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement had been attempting to dissuade Lopez from performing in the Jewish State, calling it their “J.Lo Don’t Go” campaign.
A reporter from Channel 12 asked Medina, “The BDS movement didn’t try to stop the show?” Medina replied, “There was nothing that was gonna stop us from being in Israel.”
He added, “It’s really simple: Tel Aviv and Israel deserve Jennifer Lopez, and Jennifer Lopez deserves Israel.”
“There was nothing that was going to stop us from being in Israel” – Benny Medina, Jennifer Lopez’s long time manager.
For months, the #antisemitic BDS movmement was harassing J Lo and her team about performing in Israel.
She refused to bow to the pressure! 👏🏻 @BDSreport pic.twitter.com/Yv0UWsMr4y
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) July 31, 2019
According to The Jerusalem Post, a pro-BDS group called “”Boycott! Supporting the Palestinian BDS call from within” sent Lopez a letter on July 5 urging the singer to boycott Israel, arguing that “Tel Aviv, where you are about to perform, is used as a tool for marketing the State of Israel as a ‘cool’ and ‘cultured’ democracy, while hiding a brutal history of colonization, even that of the city itself.”
Lopez and her fiancé, former baseball star Alex Rodriguez, arrived in Israel on July 31; both Lopez and Rodriguez expressed excitement about being in Israel on Instagram.
On July 25, world-renowned rock band Bon Jovi also performed in Tel Aviv despite BDS pressure. Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan told the Post, “We don’t get into politics. Rock ‘n’ roll goes everywhere and helps people forget about the world and have a good time. It doesn’t divide, and that’s what we’re talking about – unification, not dividing.”
Musicians like former Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters frequently pressure artists to not perform in Israel and boycott the Jewish state. David Draiman, frontman for the heavy metal band Disturbed, said in a May 30 Facebook video on Disturbed fan page, “The very notion that Waters and the rest of his Nazi comrades decide that this is the way to go ahead and foster change is absolute lunacy and idiocy. It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s only based on hatred of a culture and of a people in a society that has been demonized unjustifiably since the beginning of time.”
