'Death to the Arabs' is kosher — but naming their killers sparks outrage

Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury protest exposed Britain’s hypocrisy: killing Arabs is ignored, but naming their Israeli killers is the real crime.

During their annual Jerusalem Day parades meant to celebrate the 1967 Jewish conquest of all of Jerusalem from the Arabs, the Jewish squatters in Palestine unleash a bottomless basket of grotesqueries. Among the most egregious are chants like “death to the Arabs,” “[Prophet] Muhammad is dead,” and “the second Nakba is on its way.”

The Jewish state and its Western backers have never had a word of reprimand for the Jews participating in these offensive annual rituals, targeting occupied Palestinians and all that they hold sacred on their own land.

Not even when the soldiers of the Jewish state have embarked upon a crime that pales in comparison to the ethnic cleansing campaign of 1947, in Gaza, and are living out their most depraved fantasies on the bodies and minds of the 2.3 million defenceless civilians, over half of them children, since October 7, 2023 have these Western states so much as reprimanded them. Hell, they have supplied them all the necessary tools needed to exterminate the Palestinians once and for all while ensuring them diplomatic immunity at international forums.

The widespread anti-genocide rallies across the globe, however, clearly indicate that the majority of the populace in these genocidal Western states do not share in the depravity of their rulers and would pull the plug on their countries’ support if it were in their hands. This dynamic was at play at Glastonbury last weekend when punk duo Bob Vylan led over 200,000 festival attendees into chanting “Free, free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF.” The irony couldn’t be more humiliating: the BBC had pre-emptively pulled Irish rap group Kneecap from its live Glastonbury coverage, fearing that the group might voice support for Palestine. But their slot was filled by Bob Vylan — who did exactly that, and more. Not only did they voice support for Palestinian liberation, they went further, chanting for the death of a depraved death cult that has spent nearly two years broadcasting its numerous methods of killing hungry, defenceless people trapped in a besieged enclave with no escape. In trying to mute one act, the BBC inadvertently handed the microphone to another loud, defiant voice.

Now the British authorities have suddenly found a chant that offends them. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has labelled it “appalling hate speech” while a spokesman for the BBC, which aired the performance live, has apologised for the supposed infraction by the duo and called it “deeply offensive.” The police are looking into the matter for “the possibility of criminal offences.” This is all rather stunning.

It’s the same IDF whose soldiers have filmed themselves killing unarmed civilians, slaughtering people lining up to secure a bag of flour for their starving families, proclaiming their insatiable desire to kill children (“We are looking for babies, but there is no babies left… I killed a girl, she was 12, but I’m looking for a baby”), assassinating journalists, doctors, and poets, setting civilian homes on fire, using civilians as human shields, blowing up mosques, prancing around in the undergarments of the women they have either murdered or displaced, and chanting Biblical prayers before committing war crimes on camera — just to name a handful of their crimes.

Yet, all these documented crimes have elicited zero censure from the British prime minister — who, incidentally, is on the record saying cutting off Gaza’s food and water supply isn’t a war crime — or the BBC, which has done extensive propaganda on behalf of the Israelis, shielding them from the barest of scrutiny.

That’s what makes the British establishment’s current pearl-clutching over Bob Vylan’s political stand not just hypocritical, but obscene. A country that arms, funds, and politically defends a regime executing a full-throttle genocide has no moral standing to lecture artists speaking out against it. The state that calls “death to the IDF” hate speech is the same one that calls white phosphorus on the bare flesh of children in Rafah a “complex conflict,” and pretends neutrality while toddlers breathe their last under the rubble of their destroyed homes.

Let’s be clear: Unlike the widely documented anti-Muslim and anti-Arab chants of the Israelis over the years, Bob Vylan’s chant was not about Jews. It was not a religious attack. It was a political condemnation of a military organisation whose rap sheet would give psychopaths orgasmic joy. To suggest otherwise, as the British establishment and their media mouthpieces have been doing, is an act of cynical bad faith — a deliberate conflation meant to smear critics of Israel as bigots, and to protect a regime that’s rapidly losing its ability to hide behind the breathtaking lie of Western values.

What is truly “deeply offensive” is not a punk duo’s chants. It is Britain’s unwavering support for a genocidal military that has turned Gaza into an extermination camp, whose bombs have turned hospital floors into a sea of limbs and lifeless bodies, whose pilots drone-strike children’s hearts and brains with the precision of a surgeon. It’s the BBC’s role as a state mouthpiece for genocide apologetics, where rotting Palestinian corpses are statistics but an angry, conscientious crowd at Glastonbury warrants days of headlines.

Bob Vylan didn’t walk anything back — because there was nothing to walk back. While politicians foamed at the mouth and the BBC scrambled for cover, the band has stood calmly in the fire of a manufactured scandal and vocalised the truth again by declaring, “I said what I said.” That clarity — saying plainly what millions feel but their rulers refuse to admit — is what made the establishment so desperate to vilify them. Bob Vylan didn’t misspeak; they spoke too clearly. And in a country that funds a slaughter while policing the vocabulary of protest, clarity is the greater crime. It must be suppressed, vilified, and criminalised. The government would rather have you numb, drowned in alcohol, football, the news, and other banalities than pay attention to its crimes in Gaza. It will make it easier when they eventually come for you.

It is not Bob Vylan who must be investigated. It is the war criminals they named. The war criminals who return safely to Britain after committing war crimes without investigation, without repercussions. All the values that the West claimed to stand for are being incinerated right before our eyes over the past two years in Gaza and beyond.

Also read: How Palestine became the graveyard of Western liberalism

There is no reckoning on the horizon — only silence, cowardice, and complicity. So it falls to the people, the artists, the defiant voices like Bob Vylan, to say what the powerful won’t. To chant what must be chanted, to call criminals by their names, to hold a mirror to their derangement. Not because it will bring justice overnight, but because forgetting is what they’re counting on. And the least we owe our brothers and sisters in Gaza is to refuse them that comfort.

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