Concerts by Turkish pianist Fazil Say planned in Switzerland next week have been canceled due to his comments on the conflict in the Middle East, said the artist and the Swiss distribution group Migros, organizer of the event. Mr. Say was due to play from Monday to Thursday, with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, in Zurich, Bern, Geneva and Lucerne.
“Migros officials cited the ideas I expressed on Israeli-Palestinian tensions on social media to justify their decision,” Mr. Say said in a statement in English published Friday on his X account (formerly Twitter ). “Everything I wrote in my accounts is unchanged,” he added.
The four Migros Classics concerts from October 23 to 26 “are experiencing a change of program. Instead of Fazil Say, the Swiss pianist Louis Schwizgebel will perform (…),” confirmed the organizer in a press release. “The reason for this change is that Fazil Say’s public statements following the terrorist attack against Israel are not defensible for Migros,” he explains. Mr. Say said he published three tweets and a video in which he spoke. In a message on
“I totally agree. Thank you for this common-sense statement,” replies Fazil Say. “Everyone should do something to stop this war. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu should be tried for war crimes, genocide and massacres,” he continued, before adding “Freedom for the Palestinians. For Humanity. Enough of this brutality. In a video on Instagram, the Turkish pianist also says that “no one can approve of what Hamas did to innocent people.”
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“I am for peace, and all the declarations were made in a spirit of peace,” wrote Friday the pianist, an atheist declared acquitted in 2016 after being sentenced, three years earlier, to ten months in prison for a series of comments on Twitter deemed “insulting towards religious values”. A spokesperson for the AKP, the ruling party in Turkey, condemned Saturday on X the cancellation of Fazil Say’s concerts “because of his ideas opposed to Israel’s inhumane attacks.”
More than 1,400 people have been killed on Israeli territory by Hamas men since October 7, the majority of civilians mowed down by bullets, burned alive or dead of mutilation on the first day of the attack by fighters of the Palestinian Islamist movement carried out in from Gaza, according to Israeli authorities. In the Gaza Strip, more than 4,385 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in incessant bombings carried out in retaliation by the Israeli army, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health in Gaza.
