If someone pulled on a Ku Klux Klan hood and went up on a stage and shouted ‘Up the KKK!’, what would you think of that person? Call me a literalist but I’d think that person supports the KKK. I would interpret his donning of the pointy hood and his singing of the KKK’s praises as fandom for that monstrous movement. No one gets into a KKK cloak by accident.
Kneecap expect us to believe that even though they’ve waved the Hezbollah flag, they don’t actually support Hezbollah
And yet Kneecap expect us to believe that even though they’ve waved the Hezbollah flag and hollered ‘Up Hezbollah!’, they don’t actually support Hezbollah. Even though one of them posed with a book of speeches by Hezbollah’s late leader – a book that refers to Jews as ‘apes and pigs’ – they’re not Hezbollah fans. ‘We do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hezbollah’, said the Belfast rappers in a statement last night.
I don’t know about you, but I normally manage to avoid draping myself in the paraphernalia of movements I don’t support. I have never found myself on a stage wrapped in the Isis flag. I have never accidentally bellowed ‘Up the Taliban!’ to a few thousand squealing youths. So what’s Kneecap’s problem? Perhaps the poor dears have some Tourette’s-like affliction that compels them to praise groups they don’t actually like.
This is the news that the Kneecap lads are furiously backtracking on their more controversial comments. They found themselves in the eye of a media storm after footage emerged showing them waving the Hezbollah flag at one of their gigs while yelling ‘Up Hamas, up Hezbollah’. Another clip allegedly shows one of them saying ‘The only good Tory is a dead Tory’ and ‘Kill your local MP’. Such guerrilla cosplay might get their bourgeois fans hot under the collar, but it has caused a stink among more sensible folk.
Counter-terror cops said they’re looking into Kneecap’s seeming expressions of support for Hamas and Hezbollah. The band lost their work visas for the US. Festivals threatened to drop them. So now Kneecap are repenting. We don’t support Hamas or Hezbollah, they cry. We’re all about ‘love, inclusion and hope’, they insist. They’re even offering ‘heartfelt apologies’ to those hurt by their words.
This has to be one of the funniest and saddest spectacles of arse-covering we’ve ever witnessed. What self-respecting punk buckles at the first whiff of infamy? Sid Vicious is turning in his grave at the sight of these balaclava-wearing phonies saying ‘We’re sorry’ less than a week into a media crisis. It’s Kneecap summed up: they cosplay as cultural insurgents in their daft knitted headwear, yet the minute the dollars threaten to dry up they plead for forgiveness. They’re punks until the cops come knocking.
It isn’t only Kneecap’s hypocrisy that has been exposed – so has the left’s. Leftish activists and commentators have rallied to the band’s defence. It is an outrage, they say, that politicians and police want to silence these boys from Belfast. Whatever happened to freedom of speech, they’re asking.
Well, you should know. This is the same left that blacklisted feminists for the speechcrime of saying people with penises are not women. It’s the same left that conspired in the resuscitation of the regressive tyranny of blasphemy by branding all criticism of Islam ‘Islamophobia’. It’s the same left that took to the fainting couch whenever someone cracked an un-PC gag. That’s what happened to free speech: you people killed it.
You can’t institute a regime of ostentatious offence-taking in which contrarians get cancelled morning, noon and night and then act all horrified when it comes for people you like. Surely what’s good for the gender-critical goose is good for the Israel-hating gander? ‘No, no, we only want you to censor people we disapprove of’, the left is basically saying, like some blue-haired, genderfluid Nero giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to the speech rights of all mere mortals.
I’m going to say it: if you are more offended by someone saying ‘Trans women are men’ than you are by expressions of support for Hamas’s army of anti-Semites that killed more Jews in one day than anyone else has since the Nazis, then there is something seriously wrong with you. That’s more than hypocrisy: it’s bigotry. To deny Jews the protections of political correctness, to expect this ethnic group alone to have to hear gravely offensive words, is racism masquerading as progressivism.
I am a free-speech fundamentalist. I don’t want to see anyone cancelled for what they say. That includes Kneecap. Let them rap. But someone is going to have to explain – and quick – why Lucy Connolly is rotting in a cell after tweeting ‘Set fire to all the…hotels’ while Kneecap roam free despite allegedly saying ‘Kill your local MP’. My view? Both should be free.
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