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How an Israeli Music Producer Survived a Botched Kidnapping At a Fake Songwriting Camp
Late last summer, the composer and producer Itay Kashti received an email invitation to a songwriting camp. What happened next changed his life.
On a second call, days later, the same man told him that instruments and studio equipment would be provided, asked him if he had any dietary issues, and set up a car service to take him to a cottage in Carmarthenshire, a rural area of Wales north of Swansea. At the time, with phone and guitar case in hand, he ran outside and tried to flag down the first car he saw, but “I looked like Sylvester Stallone at the end of Rocky,” he remembers, with one eye swollen shut, the other partly closed, and blood all over his face. They “seemed to justify action against the victim in this case based on his background.” In a message in a group chat they shared, one of the men speculated that Kashti’s “fortune came from West Bank settlements taking Palestinian land.” Ogunnubi-Sime wrote that “all three of us have complete 100 percent faith in Allah, so we can’t fail.”
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