Rapper sounds off at social discord

Israeli Arab rapper Tamer Nafar’s politically-charged lyrics have sparked the same kind of controversy that may have made his hero Tupac Shakur proud.

Nafar, from the pioneering rap group DAM, has touched a nerve with songs like Who’s the Terrorist? skewering what he and others say is discrimination against Arabs in Israel.

He has become a star among Israel’s Arab population and Palestinians, but Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev, a former military censor with a combative style, is not a fan.

She has singled him out for criticism, accused him of incitement and sought to have one of his recent performances canceled, helping make him a target of rightwing protesters.

Speaking to AFP in a recent interview, the 37-year-old dismissed her remarks, saying: “Regev is nothing but a government mouthpiece spreading racist poison.”

Speaking after a concert in the Arab-Israeli city of Sakhnin attended by about 1,000 people, many of them teenagers, he pledged to continue with his strident lyrics matched with infectious beats.

Regev accuses Nafar of taking it too far, reportedly saying he “chooses at every opportunity and before every possible audience to come out against the idea of the state of Israel and its existence as the state of the Jewish people.”

She charges that some of his lyrics justify “terrorism”.

Arab Israelis like Nafar are descendants of Palestinians who remained after Israel was created in 1948, and they currently make up around 18 percent of the country’s population.

percent