It was in an interview with the Irish Independent that John Lydon – as he’s now known – stuck two fingers up at today’s fashionable Israelophobia. The reporter reminds him that his band, Public Image Limited, played in Tel Aviv in 2010 and asks if he would ever do so again. The ‘right’ reply to such a query, of course, is to say: ‘No. Never. I swear. Please don’t cancel me.’ Rotten’s reply? Basically: yeah, why the hell not.

He says he had a hoot playing in Israel. ‘The country is more mixed than you’re led to believe, it’s not just “Jews only”, far from it’, he said. Cue pearl-clutching from every luvvie who thinks Israel is an ‘apartheid state’ because some tit at the Guardian told them it was. ‘There were lots of Muslims in the audience when I played there’, he said. Then his killer line: ‘That was special because no Muslim nation has invited me, not ever.’

I can’t get enough of this. Where celebs normally trot out whatever anti-Israel crap they’ve heard from TikTok’s time-rich white kids in keffiyehs, here comes Johnny with the truth. The truth that Muslims in Israel are freer than Muslims in Muslim countries. They’re even allowed to rock out to the world’s best-known punk. How come? Here Lydon really hits his stride, giving voice to a truth that’s become surreally unsayable in polite society – it’s because Arabs in Israel ‘get the same rights as a Jew’, he says. The man doesn’t lie.

But surely, says the interviewer to Lydon, you can see why people would ‘object’ to you playing in Israel? Guess what? He can’t. These people just don’t know what they’re talking about, he says. If you’re one of those halfwits who thinks visiting the Jewish State is the great unwashable sin of our age, then ‘you’re working on what you’ve been told rather than what you found out for yourself’, he says. You’ve been ‘indoctrinated rather than educated’. Preach, John.

Wow, actual rebellion against the establishment left by a rock star – he’ll never get into the Eagles or Bruce Springsteen’s band (or, needless to say, Roger Waters’) with that attitude!