It’s hard, in 2025, to call out anti-Semitism. You’ll find yourself besieged by digital armies of apologists for bigotry. ‘It’s just criticism of Israel!’, they’ll wail if you express alarm about someone calling the Jewish State a ‘Nazi entity’ or protesters carrying a Jew effigy complete with horns and bloodstained mouth. It’s all the rage these days to see racism everywhere. But anti-Semitism? You spot that at your peril.
How many of those sweaty music fans clocked the horror of what was happening on stage?
Yet surely no one will defend what Primal Scream did at the Roundhouse in Camden on Monday? Surely even those craven excuse-makers for Jew-baiting, the people who always doll up anti-Semitism as ‘anti-Zionism’, will admit this was naked bigotry? For let’s be clear: if you entwine the Star of David with the Nazi swastika to create a set of mad, devilish eyes, then you are being anti-Semitic.
That is allegedly what the old rockers of Primal Scream did this week. At their gig in Camden, as they were performing their ancient hit ‘Swastika Eyes’, the screen behind them allegedly displayed images of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Only their eyes had been replaced with crazed, swirling circles made from a mash-up of the Magen David and the swastika. ‘Parastic… syphillitic… swastika eyes’, the band crooned as the pre-eminent symbol of Judaism meshed with the symbol of Nazism to create a monstrous spectacle.
Here’s my argument for why this is anti-Semitic. To weave together the symbol under which six million Jews were slaughtered with the symbol of the Jewish faith is to taunt the Jewish people in the most sickening fashion. It mocks them with their own historic grief. It marshalls their dead ancestors to the end of damning modern-day Jews as demonic. It crowns Jews the new Nazis.
Mixing together the Star of David with the swastika is not ‘criticism of Israel’. It is a horrific gutting of Judaism’s most important symbol and the reimagining of that symbol as one of evil rather than faith. Think of your Jewish friends who wear a Magen David round their necks – what does it do to them when they see their beloved icon entangled with the symbol under which their great-grandparents were gassed to death?
Many are horrified, rightly, by what Primal Scream allegedly did. The Community Security Trust, which provides security to Britain’s Jews, says ‘Entwining a Star of David with a swastika implies that Jews are Nazis and risks encouraging hatred of Jews’. The Roundhouse says it deeply regrets the display of these ‘highly offensive images’. It said it ‘absolutely condemns anti-Semitism in every form’.
What worries me is the audience response. How many of those sweaty music fans clocked the horror of what was happening on stage? Or have people got so used to the idea that the Jewish homeland is a Nazi-like state that it all just washed over them? Perhaps some of them even cheered along as the Nazi-Jew eyes flashed on the screens. To them, I would recommend some serious self-reflection.
We have a problem in the music world, don’t we? It seems blind hatred for the Jewish nation, and sometimes animus for the Jewish people themselves, has become the rad position among certain rockers. We’ve seen swarms of twentysomethings whoop with glee as Kneecap allegedly said ‘Up Hamas’. We’ve watched as smug hordes at Glastonbury chanted ‘Death, death to the IDF’. This week’s vile show of Nazi-Jew eyes has taken this hateful fad a step further.
What will be even more telling than Primal Scream’s alleged display is what happens next. Who will call this out? How about that new movement of celebs, the Together Alliance, which promises to combat ‘racism’ and the ‘far right’? Will they condemn Primal Scream? What about the ‘anti-racist’ left more broadly? Will they have anything to say about this staggeringly hurtful blending of Jewish symbols with the symbol of history’s most murderous anti-Jewish movement?
I expect not. I think people will make excuses for Primal Scream’s horror show, or at least be snivellingly silent about it. Jews are telling them how painful it is to see Judaism associated with Nazism and still they’re schtum. Keep an eye on the fallout from the Nazi-Jew outrage – we are about to find out if Jews and their feelings matter even a little to polite society and its progressive poseurs.
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