Bad Signs in JP

 

For as long as I have been in the Boston area, I have attended the Wake Up the Earth Festival which is held on the first Saturday in May in Jamaica Plain. Sponsored by a non-profit organization called Spontaneous Celebrations, the first such festival took place in 1979 after the community in both Jamaica Plain and neighboring Roxbury saw to it that the I-95 didn't raze these areas.

When I arrived in Boston in the spring of 2000, JP was my first home, and the Wake Up The Earth Festival was among the first bit of fun I had living here. After 8 years living in the Fenway, I would move back to JP and call it home for a decade before I left for New York City. Fortunately, my exile was only temporary.

I mention all of this because the Wake Up the Earth Festival is a blend of food, music and a hodge-podge of left-wing causes typically of an environmental nature. However, back in 2024, there were a whole bunch of signs concerning the Palestinians highlighted by a mural called "Palestinian Loss of Land 1947 to Present". 

Last year, following the release of the remaining hostages, there were a few small Palestinian flags, but it was far less noticeable. The same could not be said this year. One of the first things I saw was a huge sign which read "JP for Palestine".

There was another sign from Massachusetts Peace Action which read "We All Agree - No Taxes to Starve Palestinian Children". It's the sort of dubious claim which gets Jews stabbed in the U.K.

It must be said that this matter is front in center due to the War in Iran. There was an exhibit called "Eyes Wide Open - A Place to Reflect on the True Cost(s) of War" sponsored by Veterans for Peace, Massachusetts Peace Action and several other organizations. A basketball court was strewn with shoes and backpacks representing the schoolgirls killed in an U.S. airstrike at the outset of the war. There were signs which read "Remember the Children" and "In memory of the Iranian schoolgirls who were killed in an U.S. airstrike 02-28-2026".  

Indeed, those schoolgirls did not nothing to deserve their fate. The same can be said for the 118 children who were killed by the Iranian government during protests in January 2026. But where is the sign for these children? The people responsible for this exhibit are here to pillory the U.S. and Israel while turning a blind eye to the savagery of the Iranian regime not to mention its proxies Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

What worries me is the possibility that future gatherings of the Wake Up the Earth Festival could devolve into overt support for Hamas and Hezbollah accompanied by the calling for the murder of Jews (re: Zionists) as we are witnessing in the U.K.

Don't say it can't happen here because it certainly can.