Another inflection point has been reached in Britain’s embrace of cultural suicide.
The Hamas-led atrocities against Israelis on October 7 2023 threw down a challenge to the west. Did it support civilisation or barbarism? On Saturday, the Glastonbury festival provided an unambiguous answer. It turned itself into a death cult.
A rap duo called Bob Vylan shouted “Death to the IDF” and then:
Hell, yeah, from the river to the sea, Palestine must be, will be, inshallah, free.
The crowd of several thousands, many waving Palestine flags, roared their approval and took up the chants “Death to the IDF and “Free Palestine from the river to the sea”. They also chanted:
I heard you want your country back? Shut the f*ck up (you can't have that).
The lead rapper also launched into a foul-mouthed rant about Zionists and a Jewish record company boss for whom he had worked.
The IDF has Arabs, Druze and others serving in its ranks. But the vast majority are Jews, and it is the defence force of the world’s only Jewish state.
So what happened at Glastonbury was that thousands of young people — the coolest, hippest young people who are into peace and love and the brotherhood of man — were chanting for the murder of Jews, beneath a forest of flags that transmit a similar message to the Nazi swastika.
That’s because the cause of “Palestine” is founded entirely upon the aim of annihilating Israel, murdering Jews and stealing from them their own history in the land of Israel. It is no exaggeration to hear in the delirious chanting at Glastonbury the chilling echoes of the rallies at Nuremberg.
For it is only Jews, and the Jewish state, who are singled out for such murderous frenzy. The Glastonbury crowds aren’t chanting “Death to the Chinese Communist Party” or “Death to Russian forces” in protest at the persecution of the Uighurs or the onslaught against Ukraine. They chant for the murder only of those who have been defending their people against genocidal annihilation for the past 20 months.
In any moral universe, Bob Vylan would be arrested and charged with incitement to murder. The police say they are looking into this. Take your time, officers! What bit of “Death to the IDF” don’t they understand? The same bit, probably that they haven’t understood of “Death to the Jews” or “Globalise the intifada” that’s been chanted on pro-Hamas demonstrations these past 20 months.
Glastonbury’s organisers say they are appalled and that the act crossed a line. Yet they have sat by while a series of other performers swelled the hysteria of which the Bob Vylan incitement to murder was the inevitable outcome.
As reported in The National, Irish singer Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, known as CMAT, finished her set on on Friday with a call for solidarity with Palestine.
“There's no f*cking hiding it. Israel are war criminals. It's a genocide. Free Palestine,” said Kneecap member Mo Chara on stage. “But the difference it makes to people in Palestine when they see people from the other side of the world, this many people screaming…” he concluded before leading the crowd in a “Free Palestine” chant.
In May, Chara was accused under the Terrorism Act of holding a Hezbollah flag at a London event last November.
Elijah Hewson, lead singer of Dublin band Inhaler spoke out against the "genocide" of the Gazan people during his Other Stage set on Friday.
English musician Jordan Stephens, best known as one half of the group Rizzle Kicks, invited his mother to the stage to dance during his Other Stage performance on Friday. His mother both wore a keffiyeh and waved the Palestinian flag, which received strong support from the audience.
Apparently the British government is shocked that the Bob Vylan spot was live-streamed on the BBC. The Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy — the former chair of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East — has asked the BBC Director-General Tim Davie for an “urgent explanation” about what due diligence it carried out into Bob Vylan. Nandy’s spokesman said:
We strongly condemn the threatening comments made by Bob Vylan at Glastonbury.
Palestinianism has not just become the cause of causes for the young and progressive classes. It has also become viewed — obscenely — as a moral dividing line between those who lay noisy claim to conscience and those who they claim side with evil. The very reverse is the case. We are watching the performative moralisation of mendacity and murderous hatred.
In Britain, this has now reached critical mass. And both the BBC and the Labour government have played a key role in bringing about this wholesale hijack of conscience and repudiation of justice and rationality, and fuelling this current pre-pogrom climate of hatred of Israel.
Day in, day out the BBC pumps out Hamas propaganda — either from Gaza “sources” or laundered through the utterly compromised and complicit humanitarian and human rights establishment — that twists demonstrable facts in order to represent, entirely falsely, the Israeli targets of genocide as aggressors and human rights abusers.
Through serial lies and libels, through radical decontextualisation and selective reporting, the BBC has presented the IDF as demonic child-killers bent upon starving the Arabs of Gaza and wantonly killing them. Those screaming on innumerable BBC broadcasts about the numbers killed by the IDF in Gaza never acknowledge that, according to Hamas’s own statistics, more than 70 per cent of them were fighting-age males. If the BBC has ever reported on the Gazans being murdered by Hamas for the crime of receiving food aid from the Americans and the Israelis — as they are — or the Gazans expressing hatred of Hamas and gratitude to America and Israel — as they are— this must have somehow slipped under the radar.
The BBC is a principal engine of incitement to hatred of Israel. It embodies a hermetically sealed thought system in the cult of progressivism and, like the university humanities departments that closed the minds of its staff, it is beyond redemption.
As for the Starmer government, this has not only failed to tell people that this whole demonisation of Israel is based on distortion and blood libels but it has actually promoted them itself.
It was finally forced to ban one such Judeocidal group, Palestine Action, only after this managed to break into the Brize Norton military airfield and damage military aircraft, for heaven’s sake. And when he was told that Kneecap was still due to perform at Glastonbury, Starmer merely said feebly that he thought this was “inappropriate”.
Nothing, of course, about how the substance of its claims that Israelis are “war criminals” is an odious lie that has fuelled a kind of mass lunacy.
That’s because Starmer and his Labour party have helped create and validate this shocking culture in which it’s now accepted wisdom across the educated classes that Israel is a rogue state that starves babies and kills civilians in Gaza — and has “violent settlers” in the “West Bank”.
On TV this morning, the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, described the Glastonbury chanting as “appalling,” given the murder of hundreds of young Israeli rock festival-goers on October 7 2023, and as a “shameless publicity stunt”.
Yet he went on to say that what people should be talking about in the context of Israel and Gaza is the humanitarian catastrophe in the territory and the fact that Israeli settlers attacked a Christian village in the West Bank this week.
“While there’s no justification for inciting violence against Israelis,” he said, “the way in which Israel's conducting this war has made it extremely difficult for Israel's allies around the world to stand by and justify… I'd also say to the Israeli embassy, get your own house in order, in terms of the conduct of your own citizens and the settlers in the West Bank”. And he implied that while his support for Ukraine was unequivocal, Israel did not enjoy his support.
How typical of Labour’s attitude towards Israel’s fight to defend itself against extermination — crocodile tears, and then a steel-capped boot to the head.
This was precisely the kind of hate speech made by countless Labour party members — including the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary — which has helped inflame the current murderous hysteria against Israelis and Jews.
Israel has caused no humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. On the contrary, it has facilitated the import of thousands of tons of food and other aid. It is Hamas that has caused hunger by stealing the food for itself. Of this Streeting made no mention.
The way Israel has conducted this war is a moral beacon to the rest of the world. Although Hamas has used Gaza’s civilians as human shields and cannon fodder — with the resulting unavoidable killing of children and other civilians — the ratio of civilians to combatants killed at one or two civilians for every one combatant is far lower than has ever been achieved by any other military in the world, where the average is nine civilians for every one combatant. Yet rather than praising Israel for this, Streeting defamed it.
As for “settler violence” — which has become a meme among the keffiyeh crowd — this is also a gross libel against Israeli residents of the disputed territories of the “West Bank” who have borne the brunt of appalling violence day in, day out.
There is a problem with a minority of young Israeli residents of these territories who are indeed aggressive and violent. However, their unprovoked attacks are vastly outnumbered by the daily murderous onslaught by the Arabs of these territories on Jewish residents. In May, they shot and killed a pregnant woman as her husband was driving her to give birth; the baby died a few days later.
The facts about the “attack” on the Christian village to which Streeting referred are not all known, but it’s clear that the event was much more complex. As reported by Israel Today, a small group of locals started to menace an Arab village Kfar Malikh, and then violently attacked Israeli soldiers who had moved in to disperse them. The IDF says the Jewish rioters threw stones at them, damaged military vehicles, and attempted at one point to run the soldiers over.
Taybeh, a small Arab Christian village nearby, reportedly suffered damage in these riots. Yehuda Amrani, a spokesman for the Jewish communities in the area, told the paper:
Taybeh was not attacked, and Palestinian Christians are not the problem. The tensions in the region come mostly from Muslim Arabs who attack us on the roads and in the fields. With the Christians in the area, we generally have respectful relations.”…
Amrani told us that in recent months, almost every Shabbat, there have been provocations from Arab groups against Jewish residents in the area. Out of frustration and anger, a small group of Jewish youths decided to take matters into their own hands and vandalized property in the village of Kfar Malikh – an act Amrani strongly condemns: “That was wrong. Those responsible must be held accountable. The settler leadership completely rejects such behaviour and does not tolerate vigilante justice.
The IDF reportedly shot an Israeli youth in the upper body. In similar violence earlier, the Palestinian health ministry says the IDF shot dead three Arabs.
What seems to be happening in the disputed territories is repeated attacks by Arabs upon their Israeli neighbours, some of whom seek to defend themselves and others of whom commit aggressive revenge attacks. These revenge attacks are very wrong and the perpetrators should be prosecuted — as many are. The IDF are clearly struggling to contain what is an ever-more combustible situation.
However, to portray the Israeli “settlers” in general as violent and aggressive is a grotesque distortion. Vanishingly few of these Arab attacks on Israeli residents are ever reported in Britain. The majority of “attacks” by Israeli residents of the disputed territories are in fact acts of self-defence against a murderous campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Jews from these areas — where the Jews alone have the right to reside under international law.
As is usually the case, the western media presents Israeli self-defence here as aggression — and this is believed by the British public to be to be unarguably true. Unforgivably, such distortions are amplified and legitimised by government ministers like Wes Streeting.
The result is that Jews in Britain are no longer safe. Under a Labour government. You know, don’t you — the party that’s “a moral project or it’s nothing”.
Appallingly, the default narrative across cultural and political circles in Britain is now vicious incitement against Israel and its supporters. The mass lunacy on display in Glastonbury has shocked many. But the poison is now coursing through the British bloodstream.
*** My new book The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, can be bought on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk