Left Hook co-editor M. Junaid Alam recently discussed the political and the personal with the radical Palestinian-American activist and rap artist Will Youmans, who dons the moniker "Iron Sheik". His clever and powerful music is aimed against Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, and more recently, the US occupation of Iraq.
In your lyrics, you strongly identify with and support the Palestinian cause, fiercely oppose the war in Iraq and fire rhetorical salvos against US President George Bush's administration. Did you develop your politics and then find music as an avenue of expressing them, or did you first get into rapping and then develop radical politics?
My first musical influence, besides the Beatles, was Public Enemy. So I came to know music as political expression. Because of Public Enemy, my first political consciousness was centred on US race relations. My early sense of outrage was at the American history against blacks, native peoples, Mexicans, Chinese and so on.
My political views on the Middle East, my sense of the injustice there, developed separately, but the underlying principles were always the same as my views on the US domestic scene. Groups were treated unequally. My views on the Arab world and US foreign policy came a bit later. In university, the political music of the Arab world inspired my already strongly held views and showed me how effective political music can be.
I definitely started rapping before I became an activist. But only recently did it occur to me to combine the two.
What ignited your passion for politics? How much did your Palestinian roots and Arab ethnicity play a role in your radicalisation? What kind of obstacles and problems did you have to cope with when you first expressed your radicalism with rapping?
My family was a great source of knowledge for me, [but] I became political outside of my family's influence. Since there was so much activism in my family though, it probably had to seep in somehow.
My transforming moment was the 1991 Gulf War. I was in seventh grade, but jumped on a bus to Washington DC to protest with my aunt. I saw my Mum crying when the bombs were falling, even though at first I thought they were kind of cool, in a GI-Joe kind of way. But I didn't begin to understand the politics of Palestine until I went there at the age of 17. My eyes opened up and I embarked on a path of learning.
Palestinians tend to have more radical politics because the extent of the injustices committed against them is so radical. Dispossession from homeland, ethnic cleansing, cultural expropriation — we as a people had everything stolen from us. That kind of experience would make any people "radical".
For us, justice ends up being seen as a radical solution. Justice is the only path to peace though.
My main obstacle as a rapper is that I am of the books. I was never on the streets. My friends liked getting into fights. I thought it was stupid shit. I also grew up very comfortably, never had to worry about basic needs. I held down jobs since ninth grade, no doubt, but I blew all my loot on tapes and ugly clothes I wouldn't wipe my end with now. So, for people wanting street, I'm soft. I'm a nerd rapper. I care more about abstract knowledge and learning than I do about trying to compete in some testosterone contest.
You take a pretty defiant, aggressive approach with your music, taking direct aim at some main reactionary propagandists, cutting to the core of Israeli myths, and adopting the moniker of "Iron Sheik", which first belonged to a professional wrestler who played the stereotypical "Middle-Eastern bad guy" in the '70s. Do you find it therapeutic to turn the tables by using irony to show how hollow the right wing's arguments are?
Taking the name Iron Sheik feels good. It is a form of resistance. It is like beating back an invader who claims ownership over your cultural space. The Iron Sheik, as a caricature, bastardised our culture, vilified us as a people, and did it all for money. That whole idea of exploiting stereotypes for money disgusts me. We need to take back those ideas and stereotypes and mock the crap out of them. In another sense, a sheik is a learned or respected individual, and my knowledge is my strength. It is iron. MCs like to battle, well I will debate anyone, anywhere on the Israel-Palestine issue, and I will win.
Despite the wealth of scholarly information now available from Israel's own historians using declassified archives about that country's history of robbing, looting, rape and ethnic cleansing, in the US the Zionist mythology largely prevails, mostly through bullying and wild accusations of "anti-Semitism" against anybody who challenges it. How has this oppressive intellectual atmosphere affected your musical method and style in defending the Palestinians?
Zionists in the US are the high school bullies. They have managed to scare so many people into silence. Even Palestinians in the US get freaked out about speaking their mind. We self-censor, we fear what the Zionists will do. We even give them more credit than they deserve. We think they have got their stuff together, but they have had nearly a century head start in this country getting organised, fitting in. I'm here to tell everyone we will not be bullied. We will share our history. We will be honest.
And when we speak out, it will let others follow. If we don't stand up for our views, who the hell will? Once we get going, the dominoes will start falling. The more we dissent, the more everyone else will. American Jews critical of Israel need to help more than ever. They have it harder than us because they get the same stigma for speaking out, plus alienation from their own community. We should reach out with love and support to those good people. So all those ignorant Arabs and Muslims blaming "the Jews" need to rethink their views. A Jewish-American activist fighting for what's right is my brother or sister before a club-hopping Palestinian who doesn't even care about our people.
The question consuming the US left at this time is the November presidential elections. Given that there is zero difference between Bush and the Democrats' John Kerry on the issues of US support for Israel and the US occupation of Iraq, how do you view the "anybody but Bush" argument?
Tough call. I won't vote for either because I vote with my conscience. To be honest, if Bush wins, he will feel a mandate, which he never won in the first place. If he wins, his aggression will be rewarded. If Kerry wins, I'll party that Bush is gone, then cry the next morning. At least the neo-cons will be punished a little.
Has expressing politics through rap music allowed you to widen your audience and make it easier to communicate your politics to more people?
Hip hop is much more accessible for people, especially the youth and folks who don't have the leisure time to read. It is about access to knowledge. I have been fortunate enough to gain much knowledge. I want to pass on what I have learned to others and pay tribute to those folks putting that knowledge out there. People are much more likely to listen to a song than read lyrics in a magazine.
One of my most gratifying moments, an odd one for a hip-hop artist, was at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's convention in 2003. I performed "Olive Trees" and received a standing ovation from many old folks, a lot of Palestinians. Hip hop lets me tap that emotional strain that I lose too easily as an activist talking in abstractions. Music is a form of abstraction, of course, but it lets me connect to other humans in ways that writing and lectures cannot.
My other memorable moment was performing in Pine Ridge, a native-American reservation. I was in front of high school kids. Hip hop let us connect, because almost all of them listened to it. Many of the kids felt the struggle my rhymes expressed, and related it to their own.
Hip hop, as a subversive but mainstreamed medium, gives people many tools for reaching out to other communities. I'm not saying hip hop is all love or positive, but its origins were about speaking a reality. Corporations and clubs made hip hop into fascist action-fantasy bullshit. But we can take it back and use it to connect with each other.
[Check out Iron Sheik's website at , where you can listen to his tunes and support his work by buying his albums. Visit for the full version of this interview.]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, September 15, 2004.
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