So now we know. Now we know that Bob Vylan’s sick chant at Glastonbury was not a colourfully worded call for the ‘dismantling’ of a military force, as the band’s leftish apologists claimed. No, it appears that this punk act really does want the soldiers of the Jewish nation to die. A new clip shows the lead singer saying ‘Death to every single IDF soldier out there’. There it is, as clear as it is vile: they want the hundreds of thousands of men and women who serve in the Israeli Defence Forces to perish, to be wiped out without mercy.
There it is, as clear as it is vile: they want the hundreds of thousands of men and women who serve in the IDF to perish
No sooner had Bob Vylan whipped the sozzled white kids of Glasto into a frenzy of death-chanting than chin-stroking leftists were offering up pained justifications. ‘Death, death to the IDF’, the punks and the mob chanted. But they didn’t really mean ‘death’, said those who know better. They don’t actually want anyone to die, you muppets! No, this was just an expression of ‘fierce support for Palestinians’, apparently. It was a cry for the deconstruction of a ‘military machine’, we were told.
How dumb these excuse-makers now look. How red-faced must they be, these fools that rushed in to give moral cover to a medieval chant for the death of Jewish soldiers. For a new clip has emerged, filmed at Alexandra Palace in May, before Glastonbury, showing Bob Vylan’s frontman hollering for the ‘death’ of ‘every single IDF soldier out there’. There’s no dolling that up. It is plainly a hateful dream of death for all the soldiers of Zion, for every young person in Israel who by law must serve in the IDF.
The imbecility of Bob Vylan’s premature defenders is best summed up in the squirming visage of Owen Jones. He was on Piers Morgan’s show on Thursday night repeating the bourgeois left’s canard about Bob Vylan being pro-Palestine, not pro-death-for-Israelis. Then Morgan informed him of the new clip. Jones writhed and seethed like someone…well, like someone who’s just been caught out rationalising a mob chant for the death of the mostly Jewish youths who serve in the army of the Jewish nation.
We were subjected to so much gaslighting over that grim chant at Glastonbury. Those of us who said it had the pungent whiff of anti-Semitism to it, that it smacked of a fascistic yearning for the death of the Jews’ protectors, were branded silly and shrill. But we were right. Whatever that high crowd at Glasto thought they were doing as they slavishly joined the mob clamour for the death of the Jewish State’s soldiers, it’s clear what Bob Vylan intended to say: that ‘every single’ soldier of Israel should ideally die.
It is galling in the extreme to see self-styled anti-racists make excuses for such a brazenly anti-Jewish chant. Most of the IDF’s soldiers are Jews. Their singular task is to defend the Jewish homeland from the armies of anti-Semites that surround it. When you chant ‘Death to the IDF’, when you openly dream of the demise of ‘every single’ IDF soldier, you are calling for the Jews of Israel to be left to the mercy of neo-fascist militias that long to murder them. If that isn’t anti-Semitic, what the hell is?
It’s pretty clear now that Bob Vylan’s chants, so enthusiastically echoed by their fans, are worse than what Lucy Connolly said. She is currently languishing in a jail cell for that disgusting tweet she posted during the Southport riots. ‘Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care’, she said of the hotels housing migrants. It was genuinely repellent. And yet now we have Bob Vylan openly calling for the deaths of greater numbers of people, most of them Jews.
‘Every single IDF soldier out there’ – presumably that includes the hundreds of British-born Jews who have served or are currently serving in the IDF? And the IDF’s 465,000 reserve personnel as well as its 170,000 active personnel? And the IDF old guard who are sometimes invited to give speeches on campuses in the UK? Would any Jew who has served in the armed forces of their beloved ancient homeland be safe under this grotesque regime of ‘Death to the IDF’ that Bob Vylan and the left seem so rabidly keen to institute?
Look, I’m on the same page as Toby Young: I don’t want anyone to be punished and certainly not jailed for speech ‘crimes’. And yet some are and some are not. Lucy Connolly rots in jail for a violent-minded comment about migrants while Bob Vylan and thousands of others roam free, despite making violent-minded comments about the mostly Jewish defenders of the State of Israel. Fairness dictates that either both get banged up, or neither do. My preference is very firmly for the latter. I guess we’re about to find out whether Keir Starmer’s Britain is institutionally anti-Semitic.
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