Farrukh Dhondy | Targeting Israel at Glastonbury, Kumbh of Music, Raises a Storm

Every year -- not twelve! -- there is a sort of Kumbh Mela in Britain. It has no religious connotations, unless one regards pop music as a religion which, with faithful followers and hedonistic overtones, it can be.

This, gentle reader, is the annual music festival at Glastonbury in Somerset where 200,000 fans gather for five days to camp out and listen to, follow, sway and wave to an estimated 3,000 performers on a hundred different stages.

Okay, so not quite the Kumbh Mela, but then just think of the relative proportions of the populations of India and Britain.

The BBC records and transmits the performances and this year ran into censure from Prime Minister Keir Starmer, from MPs across the board and from the regular BBC-basher commentariat. Was the censure justified?

Among the performers were two bands which came in for this kind of vilification. The first is a now notorious Irish trio called Kneecap, named after the Irish Republican Army’ s method of punishing informants and renegades by shooting them in their kneecaps with low-velocity pistols. This punishment would shatter the knee caps and, of course, render the victims partially lame or, in some known cases, lead to amputations of the leg. Not very nice -- but this was the practice the IRA adopted when they perpetrated what they claimed was a war for the liberation of Northern Ireland from the UK, fighting Protestant militant organisations -- years of murder and conflict which are now euphemistically labelled “The Troubles”.

Kneecap took the stage at Glastonbury, having acquired a reputation for wild and supposedly incendiary statements over the last year. They made and then retracted incendiary statements. The rap group has been known to urge from the stage, in a frivolous sounding statement, the murder of Tory MPs.

The leader of the group has been charged by the British police with waving the Palestinian flag. No trial has yet taken place for this supposed offence.

Kneecap’s incendiary statements have led to Sir Keir Starmer saying they should not be or not have been (I’m unsure of the timing of his statement) invited onto a Glastonbury stage. Kneecap’s appearances, and the criticism they harvested as a result, has led to them denying that they meant any harm to anyone.

They play disingenuously innocent: “Me??? Big bad wolf? Blow the house down? No, no I was merely hiccupping and was misinterpreted as blowing the poor piggies’ house, etc. I love the piggies m’lud. All misrepresentation and deliberate distortion…” So spake the retracting Kneecap -- a real disgrace to the lupine race?

On this occasion, their appearance at Glastonbury, they are again accused of pro-Palestinian propaganda. One of them was wearing a T-shirt with the name of PALESTINE ACTION on it. This is the name of a group that evaded Britain’s Royal Air Force security, rode scooters into the RAF base at Brize Norton and sprayed red paint over two military aircraft. This was, of course, deemed by the Air Force and by the government as a “terrorist act” and Palestine Action was designated as a “terrorist” group.

Please note, gentle reader, that the Israel Defence Force, the IDF, which, according to objective and neutral reports, would murder Palestinian civilians every day, shoot men, women and children as they try and avoid starvation by collecting food from international aid agencies, bomb and kill Palestinian civilians by the hundreds or thousands each week, is of course not granted this condemnatory label.

Red paint on two military aircraft -- symbolic of the military aid the UK lends to the genocidal actions of the Benjamin Netanyahu regime of Israel -- is labelled “terrorism”.

Genocide is… err… acceptable as it assists the arms industry?

And so to the strictures on Bob Vylan. These are two Brit lads with Rastafarian dread-locks who appeared on the Glastonbury stage in tubby half-nakedness wearing flimsy white cotton shorts and got their thousands of followers and fans to join them in chants of “Death to the IDF”. The fans sounded enthusiastic, and yes, there were Palestinian flags waved in the midst of the adoring, approving crowds.

Nevertheless, it’s extremely improbable that the fans of Glastonbury will form armies or in any way find means to defeat the genocidal IDF.

I think it goes without saying that Bob Vylan (is that an intended double pun on Dylan and Villain?) don’t expect their stage-stated urging at Glastonbury to result in the defeat of Israel’s armies.

Even so, Jewish organisations and the UK government have reacted to their attack on the IDF as “anti-Semitism”. Yes, the Netanyahu government and the conscripted IDF ranks are Jewish, but attacking their genocidal actions is in no way an attack on the faith or race of the Jews. It’s anti-genocide, not anti-Semitism, and who better than Jews to realise that?

The distinction is crucial and a lawyer like Sir Keir Starmer knows it is… but… hey, arms deals…. trade deals…!