Finally, a celeb has stood up to the Israel bashers. It took the famously dour frontman of Radiohead to do it. At a solo gig in Melbourne, Thom Yorke was heckled by an audience member smugly demanding to know why he hasn’t spoken out about Israel’s ‘genocide’ in Gaza. Yorke wasn’t having it. He even called the caterwauling gig ruiner a ‘coward’. It’s the best thing he’s done since OK Computer.
Shaky footage filmed by his fellow concert-goers captured the man yelling at Yorke. From deep in the audience he barked something about the ‘Israeli genocide of Gaza’ and said half of those killed ‘were children’. He challenged Yorke to ‘condemn’ Israel’s actions. Yorke wasn’t happy, understandably, given he was there to sing songs, not massage the already outsized egos of the fashionably Israelophobic. So he shot back.
Radiohead singer Thom Yorke confronted a heckling anti-Israel protestor at a solo concert in Melbourne on Wednesday night. Yorke said: “Come up here and say that, right now… Come up on the f***ing stage and say what you want to say. Don’t stand there like a coward…” British… pic.twitter.com/BxHxWUZE5i
— AIJAC (@AIJAC_Update) October 31, 2024
He challenged the heckler to ‘hop up on stage’ and repeat his remarks. ‘Don’t stand there like a coward’, he said. Ouch. He accused the noisy bloke of ‘piss[ing] on everyone’s night’. He then stormed off stage – diva behaviour that was justifiable in the circumstances – but he came back a few minutes later and played Karma Police.
Three cheers for Yorke, I say. It is a brave creative who refuses to genuflect at the altar of Israel hate. Who resists the haughty demands of the self-righteous to prove your moral worth by saying ‘I condemn this genocide’. Maybe Yorke thinks it’s more complicated than that. Maybe he disagrees that it’s a ‘genocide’. Or maybe he just thinks gigs, and culture more broadly, should not be hijacked by activists who want to turn everything into a soapbox for their own moral preening.
Whatever his reasons, in refusing to repeat on request the hackneyed, fact-lite slogans of the anti-Israel set, Yorke struck a blow for the freedom to dissent. For the right to be nuanced. For the liberty to say ‘No’, even in the face of today’s extraordinary social pressure to be abrasively anti-Israel. I hope the people out there who instinctively bristle at the thin radicalism of hating Israel, but feel they can’t state their objections out loud, will take heart from Yorke’s small rebellion.
He has form on this issue. A few years ago, Radiohead came under huge pressure to cancel gigs in Israel. Lefty filmmaker Ken Loach, Pink Floyd oddball Roger Waters and even Archbishop Desmond Tutu (RIP) badgered the Radiohead lads to boycott this most wicked state. You would think Tutu would have had better things to worry about than which nations were being treated to a live version of Creep, but there we are.
Brilliantly, Radiohead refused to cave. ‘There’s an awful lot of people who don’t agree with the [Boycott Divestment Sanctions] movement, including us’, said Yorke in 2017.
Yorke has form on this issue
He pushed back against the ‘black and white’ morality of the Israel boycotters. And against their viciously intolerant streak too, where they come to view everyone who disagrees with them as a witch-like figure, a heretic, an apologist for ‘genocide’.
‘[R]ather than engage with us personally, [they] throw sh*t at us in public’, said Yorke of these so-called progressives who will write you off as a lunatic who doesn’t care a damn for Palestinian life if you deviate even a little from their infantile script.
Scarily, this fashion for ‘throwing sh*t’ at those who refuse to fall in line with hip Israel-hate has intensified since 2017. Indeed, that heckler who called on Yorke to condemn Israel captured just how authoritarian the anti-Israel movement has become.
They now demand intellectual obedience from everyone. They expect slavish agreement with their every edict, and if you refuse to give it, you will be treated as morally suspect. The disbelievers must be accosted in public in an effort to shame them into bowing down and saying, ‘Yes, yes, Israel is evil’. There’s an eerie feel of religious fervour to this supposedly radical movement, where they have come to associate hating Israel with being ‘virtuous’ and refusing to hate Israel with being ‘fallen’.
This is what worries me most about the anti-Israel movement right now. It measures people’s moral worth by whether they hate this one state with sufficient vigour and venom. When you build your entire sense of virtue on a loathing for the world’s only Jewish nation, you might find it is a short step to an outlook that is really problematic. So good on Yorke for resisting. He has reminded us of the profound importance of freedom of thought.
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