The Permitted Racism

378 people were murdered at the Nova music festival in southern Israel on October 7th: 378 young people who just wanted to dance, let loose and party, as young people all over the world do at music festivals. They were murdered by Hamas, in cold blood and in a murderous frenzy, filmed by Hamas themselves as they did it. Some were raped, others tortured, others still kidnapped and taken as hostages back to Gaza where some still suffer unimaginable atrocities in their underground dungeons.

Today, tens of thousands of their festival-going counterparts at Glastonbury, led from the stage by Bob Vylan, chanted “Death, death to the IDF”. They, too, were just young people at a music festival, and the ease with which they went along with a call for Israelis to be killed reveals a deep sickness at the heart of our culture.

Something broke at Glastonbury today. I can’t remember any other single occasion when a crowd of that size chanted for anyone to be killed. It’s the kind of mass hatred that belongs at a Blood & Honour neo-Nazi gig, not at Britain’s biggest music festival, broadcast live on the BBC. But it happened, and it lays bare the sheer permissibility of hating Israelis even to the point of wishing them dead. This is the racism that is not just allowed but actively celebrated in progressive circles.

This is a music industry that did virtually nothing in response to the Nova festival massacre. That was the worst terror attack on a concert in living memory, far eclipsing the numbers killed in similar horrors: the ninety victims at the Bataclan Theatre in Paris in November 2015, the sixty people shot dead at a music festival in Las Vegas in 2017, and the twenty-two murdered in the bombing of an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena in 2017. But whereas stars from around the world came together for a charity concert with Ariana Grande to support the victims of that atrocity, instead, when it comes to Israelis, we get Kneecap leading their fans in a chant of “Up Hamas” – the very people who slaughtered all those young festivalgoers on October 7th.

Everyone knows that, despite all the talk of free speech, if Kneecap had led their fans in chants of “up Combat 18” at their gigs and waved the flag of National Action – a banned neo-Nazi terrorist group – they would not be playing at Glastonbury and their set would not be broadcast on the BBC. But because Kneecap chose to celebrate Hamas and Hizbollah rather than neo-Nazi terrorists, they get the backing of Paul Weller, Massive Attack, Fontaines DC, and dozens of other luminaries of the music industry. Hizbollah, let’s not forget, is a thoroughly antisemitic, murderous organisation. They killed 85 people in blowing up the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994, and have left a bloody trail of anti-Jewish terrorism around the world ever since. They invented the antisemitic lie that 4,000 Israelis (or Jews, they tend not to make a distinction) didn’t turn up to work in the World Trade Centre on 9/11, because those attacks were supposedly a Jewish plot. But in the fashionable, progressive music industry, supporting Hizbollah does not make you a racist. It makes you a free speech hero.

Meanwhile, Oi Va Voi, a band of Jewish heritage that plays Jewish and Israeli-themed music, has had their gigs cancelled, not for anything they have said or done, but simply because they have an Israeli singer, and these supposed champions of free speech in the music industry are silent. The double standards are so stark it reeks of prejudice.

Is it antisemitic to chant “Death, death to the IDF”? Or is it ‘only’ anti-Israeli? When you are calling for people to be killed, such semantics tend to feel rather irrelevant. In 2004 Sacha Baron Cohen showed how easy it is to get a music crowd to sing along with a call for Jews to be killed, but Borat’s ‘Throw the Jew Down the Well’ was satire. Bob Vylan’s equivalent was chillingly sinister.

Still, it leaves us with the clarifying virtue of knowing where we stand. Now we know that it’s OK to call for Israelis to be killed, and a Glastonbury crowd will chant along. The festival is inclusive, we are told by its owners, and open to all: even to those who want to see the mass murder of our fellow Jews in Israel. And despite all the warnings and previous complaints about the BBC’s inadequacies in this area, despite the obvious and predictable controversy surrounding Kneecap, and despite the fact that we are living through a time of such heightened extremism and antisemitism, our national broadcaster was so ignorant or complacent or complicit that they managed to broadcast “Death, death to the IDF” to the nation. Incitement to violence via the licence fee – just when you thought a new low was impossible, they found a way.

If anyone is still wondering why so many Jews are asking what has happened to this country: this is why. Whether it meets an academic, technical definition of antisemitism is beside the point. Murderous hatred is alive in our society, and it is directed at people like us. If that doesn’t bother you, if it doesn’t ring every alarm bell in your anti-racist consciousness, then you aren’t the anti-racist you think you are. You’re just an antisemitic fellow traveller with a Glastonbury wristband.

This piece was first published on Dave Rich’s Substack which you can subscribe to here.