The day after the Nova music festival massacre, the Irish band Kneecap posted a photo of themselves grinning from ear to ear alongside the words: ‘Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.’ The bodies of the 364 revellers butchered by Hamas were barely cold before these rappers from Belfast seemed to give smiley support to the militants who did it. ‘Palestinian struggle’, they called it, when what the rest of us saw was a straight-up pogrom in which Israeli youths were raped and murdered without mercy at a trance festival made into a slaughter zone.
Fast forward 18 months and Kneecap themselves are performing at a music festival in a desert. It’s Coachella in California, the annual get-together of America’s bourgeois white kids keen to splash some of daddy’s money on seeing their fave bands. Kneecap whipped the privileged attendees into a frenzy of faux virtue by getting them to chant ‘F**k Israel’. Those words were emblazoned on the screen behind the band too, no doubt titillating the Ivy League Marxoids and TikTok radicals in the crowd.
Honestly, can you think of anything more heartless? This outburst of turbo-smug Israel-bashing at Coachella sums up the moral infantilism and outright cruelty of what passes for ‘progressive’ activism these days. Here were the happy, safe youths of America cheering a band that seemed to make light of a massacre of festivalgoers who were just like them. Here were self-styled rebellious kids raging, not against the racist militants who visited their fascism on a music festival in a desert, but against the nation that was the victim of that crime against humanity.
There was not a whisper of solidarity for the 364 festivalgoers slain by Hamas. No banner mentioned those souls lost to the guns and knives of an army of anti-Semites. Maybe they had it coming? I mean, they were Israeli, and as the boys of Kneecap say, ‘F**k Israel’. What a catastrophic failure of humanity that not one of the moshing brats at Coachella could bring themselves to pay tribute to their fellow festivalgoers who were put to death for one reason and one reason only: they were Jews.
Kneecap have caused a storm with their Israelophobic stunt at Coachella. They’ll be thrilled about that: these pseudo-punks live on food, water and the outrage of their media haters. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of them. You’re not missing much. They’re a rap act in IRA fancy dress. One of them wears a knitted tricolour balaclava. He’s 35 and a former schoolteacher. They rap about taking ket and hating Brits. Posh Corbynites in Dalston love them. The Daily Mail doesn’t.
And they’re obsessively anti-Israel. They really have it in for the Jewish State. They say ‘f**k it’ all the time. They showily accuse it of committing genocide in Gaza. They go further, too. They don’t only fume against Israel like every other faux radical of our time who mistakes wearing a keffiyeh for having a personality and getting praised by the Guardian for being cool. They also make supportive noises about the armies of anti-Semites that surround the world’s only Jewish nation and dream of destroying it.
So they offered solidarity to the ‘Palestinian struggle’ 24 hours after that ‘struggle’ laid waste to 1,200 mostly Jewish lives. One of them has posed with a copy of the collected speeches of Hassan Nasrallah, the late leader of Hezbollah who was a notorious anti-Semite. At a gig in London last year, Kneecap waved the Hezbollah flag and got the audience chanting ‘Ooh-ahh-Hezbollah’. This was just weeks after Hezbollah massacred 12 Druze children and drove tens of thousands of Jews from their homes in Northern Israel.
I bet everyone who attended that London gig fancies themselves as a nice, decent, anti-racist person. Yet here they were cheering a racist militia at the behest of the boys of Kneecap. Hezbollah is anti-Semitic. It describes the Jewish State as a ‘cancerous growth’ that ‘must be destroyed’. Any Jew who survives this destruction ‘can go back to Germany, or wherever they come from’, it says. This is a genocidal ambition, a dream of racial elimination. If you cheer this vile outfit, if you wave its flag, you’re not a radical — you’re a fellow traveller of Islamofascism.
Kneecap’s open flirting with the words and paraphernalia of the terror armies that dream of destroying Israel captures the immorality of today’s voguish Israelophobia. This is less an anti-war movement than an anti-civilisational movement, where Western youths get a cheap punkish thrill from aligning themselves with violent groups that don’t only hate Israel but the entire Western world. Kneecap love to cosplay as Irish republicans. But, seriously, if they don’t cut out this Hezbollah/Hamas sympathising, they’ll start to look more Oswald Mosley than James Connolly.
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