Hamas Songwriter Scores Gig As Bar Mitzva DJ

“I might just bomb,” he said. “But that I’m used to.”

Shuja’iyya, Gaza Strip, May 27 – Fredj Al-Julsun, 27, never knew just a year ago that his foray into composing propaganda songs for the Islamist group Hamas would lead to career opportunities beyond the beleaguered confines of the Gaza Strip. But now, after his second surprise hit song, Israeli consumers have taken a liking to his musical talent and engaged him to handle the music at several bar and bat mitzva celebrations.

Al-Julsun first achieved prominence last summer, when his “Tkof Taase Bigguim” became unexpectedly popular among the very Israelis it was supposed to intimidate. The song and its accompanying video repeatedly showed carnage and destruction from Hamas terrorist attacks, and brandished some of the newer, more powerful rockets with which Hamas soon attacked Israel. However, it surged in popularity as a result of the production’s childish bullying attempt fused with compelling rhythms and tunes and comically overwrought Hebrew sung with a Palestinian accent. While the song failed spectacularly to accomplish its intimidation aims, Al-Julsun gained attention in Israel from audiences who appreciate a good tune no matter what the source.

His second unexpected hit was released this past month, another musically complex and rhythmically interesting offering that exhorted Israelis to avoid army service in favor of various temporal pleasures. The song proved not quite as successful as his first hit, but Al-Julsun still turned heads and ears, enough for several Tel Aviv-area families to express interest in hiring the young man as a DJ for their children’s coming-of-age celebrations.

Al-Julsun is nervous as the first of the three engagements approaches next Thursday. “Obviously I’m going to open with one of the two familiar numbers they already know, but I’m on edge because they’ve never heard my other stuff,” he confessed. He plans to use at least two other songs that did not make it through Hamas’s editorial vetting process.

The first of which uses photographs of dead children from the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts to warn Israel not to mess with Hamas. It was nixed by Al-Julsun’s superiors because they were reserving those images for an extensive social media campaign in which those children’s images would be portrayed as having occurred under Israeli bombardment.

Al-Julsun’s other offering was planned with an accompanying animation sequence involving cars that run down Israelis, but  the animators were killed by a Hamas rocket that landed short.

Three songs are obviously not sufficient to keep a party going for several hours, so Al-Julsun plans to make heavy use of older tunes with which audience might not be familiar. “I just discovered a whole trove of relatively obscure neo-Nazi bands from the seventies and eighties, with a great sound,” he gushed. “Can’t wait to share that with my audience as well. We apparently appreciate the same kinds of things.”

Still, Al-Julsun is unsure how well he will perform. “I might just bomb,” he said. “But that I’m used to.”