BOB VYLAN, GLASTONBURY AND THE BANALITY OF JEW HATRED:
If you can’t see it now, you never will. The sight of tens of thousands of people at Glastonbury yesterday joining in a spirited chant of ‘Death, death to the IDF’ was the sight of us officially becoming a very different country, I fear. One in which anti-Israel hysteria has so flawlessly rehabilitated Jew hatred that it has become unthinking, conformist, almost mundane. Something that Home Counties idiots can jive to before adjusting their hot pants and heading off to catch Charli XCX. Something that is broadcast by the BBC into millions of homes. The banality of the new anti-Semitism.
Let’s not muck about here. When punk-rap duo Bob Vylan called for the killing of Israeli soldiers yesterday – as they warmed up the crowd at the West Holts Stage for every Israelophobe’s new favourite Irish rap trio, Kneecap – they weren’t opposing war. They were calling for war, and on the one army on Earth charged with protecting Jews from genocide. The army now at war with a jihadist cult that murdered, raped and kidnapped its way through an Israeli festival not unlike Glastonbury on 7 October 2023. The army that almost all Israelis are expected to serve in. Indeed, those making excuses for that sickening call-and-response yesterday hopefully don’t know that Hamas justifies killing Israeli civilians on the grounds that they are basically all tainted by national service. That they are all enemy combatants. Death, death to that IDF?
Whether we got here by ignorance or conscious hatred is pretty much moot. The end result is British Jews – at Glasto or at home – watching thousands whoop as Jew-killing slogans are recited. Frontman Bobby Vylan also treated the crowd to a deranged rant about the indignities he suffered working for a ‘Zionist’ at a record label, because he had to listen to his boss talk favourably about Israel. I wonder if he knows that the vast majority of British Jews are Zionists. I wonder if he cares.
I wonder if he knows the back catalog of the man whose stage name he borrowed? I wonder if he cares:
Meanwhile, more peace and love coming from the British pop music scene: Met won’t prosecute Kneecap over ‘Kill your MP.’
How low is too low? Kneecap seem determined to find out, judging by their never-ending mission to troll the UK. But last month even the West Belfast trio seemed to go too far, after a video emerged of them calling for the death of British MPs. It prompted a grovelling statement from the band, insisting that they would not incite violence against any individual. Real hard men, eh?
Of course, cynics suggested that Kneecap’s capitulation had less to do with genuine remorse and concern for the likes of David Amess’s family, and more to do with an effect on ticket sales. But now the not-so-funny trio can sleep easy, for Steerpike has checked and counter-terror police have confirmed they will not be charging the group over a November 2023 video in which they say ‘the only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP’.
I’m so old, I can remember back to last year, when such language could get one arrested in England: How one woman’s racist tweet sparked a free speech row.
In July last year, prompted by a false rumour that an illegal immigrant was responsible for the murder of three girls at a dance workshop in Southport, Connolly posted online calling for “mass deportation now”, adding “set fire to all the… hotels [housing asylum seekers]… for all I care”.
Connolly, then a 41-year-old Northampton childminder, added: “If that makes me racist, so be it.”
At the time she had about 9,000 followers on X. Her message was reposted 940 times and viewed 310,000 times, before she deleted it three and a half hours later.
In October she was jailed after admitting inciting racial hatred.
Three appeal court judges this week ruled the 31-month sentence was not “manifestly excessive”.
Stephen O’Grady, a legal officer with the Free Speech Union (FSU), said the sentence seemed “rather steep in proportion to the offence”.
His organisation has worked with Connolly’s family since November and funded her appeal.
Mr O’Grady said Connolly “wasn’t some lager-fuelled hooligan on the streets” and pointed to her being a mother of a 12-year-old daughter, who had also lost a son when he was just 19 months old.
He said there was a “difference between howling racist abuse at somebody in the street and throwing bricks at the police” and “sending tweets, which were perhaps regrettable but wouldn’t have the same immediate effect”.
It’s like Prime Minister Starmer has multiple different standards of justice for his nation. Two tiers, as it were:
One British comedian does an awesome Norm Macdonald impersonation:
Alas, England in general seems determined to remain a safe space for people who want to kill Jews, based on the ideology of current management.
