Mick Hartley

The Nova exhibition is finally coming to London:

This week an immersive exhibition commemorating the festival opens in London. It is titled 06:29AM — The Moment Music Stood Still, referring to the time the music stopped as terrorists unleashed their carnage on more than 3,000 young people from around the world who had gathered on a holiday weekend to dance. 

Recreating the site in the aftermath of the atrocity in vivid detail, the exhibition features actual staging, scorched vehicles, bullet-riddled structures and tents, as well as thousands of personal items discarded in the chaos….

Drawing on 430 filmed interviews with survivors and witnesses, more than 10,000 photographs and videos filmed by attackers, and official records and material from attack sites, the 300-page report concluded that rapes, sexual assault and sexual torture were intended “to maximize pain and suffering”. Witnesses quoted in the report describe hearing and seeing violent gang rapes at the Nova festival.

At the exhibition, there is a picture wall commemorating those killed that day, phone footage filmed by witnesses and in-person testimonies from survivors, returned hostages and bereaved families…..

The exhibition has already been to ten cities worldwide including Tel Aviv, Berlin, New York and Los Angeles, and drawn more than 600,000 visitors. At the LA exhibition, 21-year-old Stanford University student Taryn Thomas, who had led Pro-Palestinian rallies on campus after October 7, experienced an awakening. She was one of a group of 40 non-Jewish students invited to visit by the organisers.

In a speech last year, which went viral on Instagram, Thomas said: “After October 7, social media flattened a century of history into two opposing hashtags. Students supporting the Palestinian cause became a litmus test for activists like myself. In my progressive circles, my questions about the slaughtered civilians and hostages were met with whataboutisms and slogans such as ‘resistance is justified when Palestine is occupied’.

“[Inside] I was confronted with the truth no social media post had captured. October 7 wasn’t a headline, it was a human catastrophe. The victims weren’t just numbers, they were people my age, dancing one moment, fleeing for their lives the next. In that moment, I stepped out of political dogma and into human grief and empathy.”

So this needs to be seen. But they don’t tell you where:

Nova Exhibition London opens at an east London venue on May 20; www.novaexhibition.com

At an East London venue?? Apparently the exact details of the venue can’t be published in advance “for security reasons”.

And now:

The main sign of the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in London has been removed at the request of London police following concerns over the potential for antisemitism and terrorism. The festival organizers confirmed this to The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.

Whatever this says about London, and the Met, it’s not good.