Activist singer/songwriter Dave Lippman has released a song highlighting the campaign to Boycott G4S, the multinational Danish-British security corporation that provides security systems, control rooms and equipment to Israeli prisons and detention centers, checkpoints and police training centers. Despite the documentation of G4S’ involvement in human rights abuses in Palestine, Canada, Australia, the UK and elsewhere, a call from Palestinian prisoners to boycott G4S, and hundreds of international organizations demanding boycott, the United Nations continues to maintain contracts with G4S. G4S contracts have been cancelled around the world in response to popular pressure.
Video (images from Addameer):
Lippman writes:
“G4S claims to be in the security business. But actually they increase insecurity, first for Palestinians, then for Israel, which is burying itself under a pile of lies and expropriations of other peoples’ lands. What time is it? Time to boycott, divest, divorce, cancel, and condemn. Footage from by Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association and the G4S corporation.
Lyrics:
We want to help the whole world
End poverty and war
But it’s you before me except when we see
Who you’re building prisons for
Now, now, now you try to tell us
You do security
But you support settlements
And prisons where people rot in obscurity
G4S, puts Palestine in distress
Helps Israel to dispossess, so I guess
G4S we’re gonna boycott you
G4S, puts Palestine in distress
Helps Israel to dispossess, so I guess
G4S we’re gonna boycott you
Come on get your prisons out of Palestine
Mass incarceration’s where you really shine
I’m a gonna teach you how to shut it down
Come on, you’re complicit, now turn your self around
Surveillance and occupation
Are the branches of their business tree
And until we cancel their contracts
You know the people can never be free
How, how, how, how to stop the suffering
USA & Palestine, boycott, divest, add the two
Listen to me people, that’s all you gotta do
G4S, puts Palestine in distress
Helps Israel to dispossess, so I guess
G4S we’re gonna boycott you
BBC has cut ties
So have universities
Trade unions, churches, charities
Even banks and the Europe-ans
That’s the future we will see
Boycott, divest, you and me”
