To veteran BBC documentary-maker, Louis Theroux. On The Louis Theroux Podcast, the longtime interviewer spoke to Bobby Vylan – one half of the punk-rap band Bob Vylan which led a chant of ‘death to the IDF’ at Glastonbury – in his first interview since the summer music festival. But it seems listeners have not been left all that impressed by the discussion…
First, Vylan described how BBC staff at the music festival didn’t flag any concerns about his IDF chant after the band had finished their set. ‘We came off stage, it’s normal. Nobody thought anything,’ the musician insisted. ‘Even staff at the BBC were like “that was fantastic, that was fantastic, we loved that”… This was a couple hours later. Nobody at the BBC at that time was there like “oh my gosh”.’ How interesting. The Beeb later released a statement saying that the band was deemed high risk ahead of its performance, and during the gig the editorial team took the decision not to cut the feed. Later the director general told the team that none of the show should feature in further coverage.
Theroux then brought up allegations that, after the band’s Glastonbury set, reports of antisemitic incidents in the UK spiked according to the Community Security Trust, a monitoring and Jewish community safety organisation. ‘What were they counting as antisemitic incidents?’ Vylan shot back. ‘I didn’t see what they were counting as antisemitic incidents when I read it in the Guardian either… I don’t think I have created an unsafe atmosphere for the Jewish community.’
In fact, despite being dropped by his agent and the cancellation of his US tour, the rapper said he would do it all again: ‘If I was to go on Glastonbury again tomorrow, yes I would do it again. I’m not regretful of it. I’d do it again tomorrow, twice on Sundays.’ Despite his protestations that his Glastonbury chant wasn’t an issue, however, Vylan was a little reticent about drawing attention to an earlier song – England’s Ending – in which he rapped: ‘Kill the f***ing Queen. She killed Diana. We don’t love her anyway.’ Charming.
And Theroux himself is facing a backlash after the conversation moved to the issue of white supremacy. Vylan remarked that: ‘I think it’s important to not just view what Israel is doing as…an isolated thing; it needs to be looked at and viewed through the wider lens of white supremacy.’ His interviewer responded:
There’s an even more macro lens which you can put on it, which is that Jewish identity in the Jewish community as expressed in Israel has become almost like an acceptable quote, unquote way of understanding ethno-nationalism. And so it’s like they’re prototyping an aggressive, militarised form of ethno-nationalism, which is then rolled out, whether it’s by people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Trump in the US. A certain sense of post-Holocaust Jewish exceptionalism or Zionist exceptionalism has become a role model on the national stage for what these white identitarians would like to do in their own countries. Does that make sense?
Some have suggested Theroux might want to reacquaint himself with a history of the early 20th century…
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