Call John Ondrasik an accidental protest singer.
The Grammy nominee, the force behind the best-selling Five for Fighting, is best known for melodic smashes like “Superman” and “100 Years.”
Recently, he started putting current events into his songs following the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan two years ago.
“Blood on My Hands” excoriated the Biden administration for its calamitous plan that left many dead and put dangerous forces back in charge of the Middle Eastern nation. His follow-up song, “Can One Man Save the World?” honored President Vladimir Zelensky and the Ukrainian people as Russian forces stormed their country.
Now, Ondrasik has a new song recalling the ghastly Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that left roughly 1,200 people dead and hundreds more as captives of Hamas.
“’OK’ is not a political message, but a moral one. A call to action,” Ondrasik says in press notes tied to the release.
The visuals accompanying the song are difficult to watch. Hamas terrorists captured much of their barbarism on video, and snippets of that violence can be seen early in the clip.
The singer/songwriter made the difficult decision to include them because many won’t believe what happened on Oct. 7 without seeing it for themselves.
Others will still deny reality.
It isn’t just the terrorist attacks that are highlighted in the music video. We see people tearing down posters of the Hamas hostages, an act both incomprehensible and commonplace since Oct. 7. The New York Times’ ghastly coverage of the early stages of the war gets an unflattering close-up.
So does Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who cowardly ran away when a journalist asked why she supported Hamas’ Fake News attack on Israel.
Below is Ondrasik’s full statement regarding the song and its purpose:
“On October 10th, 2023, the Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, made a powerful speech, decrying the celebrations of Hamas massacres across New York City. His words of conscience “We Are Not Alright” begin my new song and music video “OK,” which addresses the barbaric Hamas October 7 attacks in Israel, and the global fallout that resulted. Such is the theme of this song. In short, “We Are Not OK.”
We Are Not OK as a nation when certain members of Congress refuse to condemn terrorists who kidnap and decapitate babies.
We Are Not OK as a world when the United Nations General Assembly rejects a motion to condemn Hamas and U.N. General Secretary Antonio Guterres seeks to “contextualize” the brutal rapes, murders, kidnappings and terrorism of October 7.
We Are Not OK when legacy women’s rights groups and global organizations supposedly devoted to women’s human rights have little to no comment after grandmothers, women, and young girls are raped, tortured, and murdered.
We Are Not OK when concertgoers celebrating in the desert are raped, massacred, and kidnapped at a festival for peace – and the majority response from music industry executives, artists, and Hollywood are lawyered statements loaded with cowardly apathy. [emphasis added]
We Are Not OK when our flagship universities become harbors for gross anti-Semitism and radicalization, headed by presidents, boards, and faculty steeped in moral and intellectual corruption, who lack the spine to simply declare right from wrong.
We Are Not OK when leading media platforms seem more focused on creating narratives of moral equivalency between the actions of Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas, rather than denouncing the barbarity and terrorism on Oct 7th and ignoring Palestinian innocents being used as human shields in hospitals and schools, built over terrorist tunnels, funded by international aid.
And on and on…
Clearly, the causes of the moral decline on our campuses, in our culture, and institutions have been growing and metastasizing for decades. An inability to clearly call out the horrors of Hamas’ terrorist atrocities is not the root of the problem; it is the symptom of a deeper decay.
We can look away no longer. Evil is on the march and wears many faces.
The post Five for Fighting on Hamas Atrocities: ‘Evil Is on the March’ appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.