Appalled by the Bob Vylan Glasto fiasco?

The IDF is a special group of special people who deserve our unconditional love and support because, when you really think about it, Israel's military is every country's military. Apparently.

Obviously, it wasn’t funny. I didn’t laugh, and neither should you.

After months of manufactured outrage at Irish band Kneecap for whatever the media and cops could dig up on them, the BBC, as a member of the bastion of freedom that is the British media establishment, decided not to broadcast their Glastonbury set this year. They did, however, platform Bob Vylan. Anyone aware of Bobby and Bobbie’s work will be aware of just how not at all amusing this is.

During their set, the duo, known for their aggressively anti-racist and pro-liberation stance, displayed anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian messages, chanted “Free, free Palestine” and got the audience to chant “death, death to the IDF”. And, let me tell you, pearls were clutched, hard.

Bobby and Bobbie of Bob Vylan. Photo by Ithaka Darin Pappas.

Comment sections went Full Gammon, the Beeb was blamed, and Keir Starmer (for the love of God, won’t someone think of Keir Starmer?) was “appalled”. May God bring him the comfort he needs at this difficult time.

Apparently, the police will be having a word with Bobby Vylan — which we should in no way see as intimidation, just normal, healthy democracy stuff in a country that regularly congratulates itself on protecting the right to free speech while classing minor criminal damage and vandalism as “terrorism”.

And I get the outrage, I do.

Sure, the most recent independent survey puts the number of human beings the IDF has killed in Gaza at over 80,000 mostly unarmed men, women and children. And yes, IDF soldiers are reporting (mostly in Israeli newspapers because UK publications don’t like to worry our pretty little heads with this kind of thing) that they are being ordered to kill Palestinians seeking food aid.

But that is no reason for someone to say mean things about the people doing the killing. Words hurt, Bobby. Don’t bully the fifteenth-largest military in the world.

The easily outraged and selectively moral have called the chant ‘hate speech’, which raises some questions. As hate speech is generally defined as expressing hatred on the basis of colour, race, sex, disability, nationality, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation, which of these is the IDF? No judgies or kink-shaming, obviously, but it’s a struggle to think of IDF membership as a sexual identity. And while it takes obvious moral impairment to take part in a genocide, it’s a stretch to call that a disability. The IDF comes in a range of colours, genders and religious orientations, too, so that leaves nationality. But, despite Israeli law forcing people to, many Israelis refuse to serve (I interviewed several of them for the upcoming issue of S(H)ibboleth magazine.) Not only that, but the UK has been at pains to make clear that British subjects are allowed to serve in the IDF. It is neither all Israelis nor only Israelis.

Considering all this, and the fact that the IDF is credibly accused of committing a genocide right now by most human rights groups and many countries, perhaps“death to the IDF” is not hate-speech.

It is, however, a strong rhetorical statement of rage against a foreign military, quite possibly in an abstract sense. If we find that unacceptable, let’s do a quick hypocrisy check.

Were I to wish in this newsletter for the North Korean military to be destroyed, by this week’s logic, I should be sanctioned. If you were to proclaim on a Glasto stage that you hoped Russian soldiers invading Ukraine died, or expressed the desire to see Iran bombed, (which would logically result in countless deaths), would Keir raise a mournful shout at how appalling it all was?

It seems pretty strange for our Prime Minister to be so outraged on behalf of another country’s military, but, then, in the USA, laws have been passed prohibiting people from boycotting a particular state. The same state, oddly enough. Which probably has nothing to do with the amount of money that country’s supporters pump into the campaigns of candidates who specifically serve that foreign power’s interests at the heart of their government, or the fact that said state is used as a proxy for our own interests in an irritatingly independent region that keeps proving resistant to our desires. And is all this being justified by a gaslighting propaganda campaign that calls anti-racists anti-Semites and human rights campaigners hate-mongers?

Of course not. You sound so crazy right now.

If you find it all hard to understand, remember the simple principle: if Russia, China, Cuba or the wrong Korea does it, it’s evil and a threat. If Israel does it, shut the fuck up. They are the good guys.

I have sat in churches where people joined in prayer for the death of Robert Mugabe and the destruction of (the contemporary state of) Israel’s enemies. They were not arrested, but then, they weren’t at a music festival, which have never been political (that’s why nobody talked about Vietnam at Woodstock). I have seen celebrations of military victories (attained by the slaughter of masses of foreign soldiers) in public spaces and church monuments alike. At no point did anyone say they were appalled.

I’ve been told for years now that some groups resisting Israel are evil because they kill civilians, and I have listened to British media and politicians alike justify violence because the targets were military. Soldiers, by the rules our society has set up, are fair game for killing, according to the rules of war I was taught. So the sudden squeamishness about wishing them ill seems odd. Maybe I just don’t understand.

Perhaps what our Government and media and the moral cowards who still deny the ongoing genocide actually want is for artists and citizens only to use their art and speech to defend those on an approved list of allies, and to hate a list of enemies derived from the pages of the Daily Mail.

As a Christian, I am called to remember that every human being is made in the image of God, and in that sense, I am called to abhor violence that robs people of time on earth, of love and fullness of life. I am also called to love justice and join with Mary and the prophets in wanting to see the mighty brought low, the prisoners freed and the oppressed liberated. These things can be in tension even beyond the realms of hypocrisy where we cheer Russian, or Nazi German deaths while proclaiming our nonviolence.

I try not to identify too closely with the biblical passages that approve of the destruction of the violent and evil, because I am only too aware of my own failures and shortcomings. But I don’t take this to mean it is my job to judge the way others resist their own oppression (or speak out on behalf of the oppressed).

I used to be a pacifist. The best parts of me still wish for peace, Shalom, harmony and universal goodwill. But these values are far too often deployed in the service of oppression and injustice. In Apartheid South Africa, far too often, the mantra of ‘peace’ was employed to discourage support for legitimate resistance to racist oppression and violence, and this is still the playbook of the oppressor.

As Christians, we need to interrogate our own attitudes and beliefs on this. Are we truly pacifists, or just when the violence is being committed by people we don’t like? Do we have a defensible reason for judging those who, after exhausting peaceful options, turn to force for their liberation? Do we have an alternative to offer that is not simply “be patient and (passively or proactively) sacrifice yourself in a way I would not accept for my own friends, my own children”?

If we are appalled by someone wishing hypothetical death on a foreign military, we should, at very least, be more appalled at that military killing 80,000 real human beings. And we should fight, tooth and nail, the criminalisation of one while our Government supports the other.

---

Subscribe to S(h)ibboleth

If you like this newsletter, you’ll like S(h)ibboleth magazine, a print mag available to order all over the world. It features left-leaning Christian (and non / post-Christian) opinion, features, funnies and news coverage. It’s pretty cool. Check it out here and subscribe by smashing the button below.

If you don’t like this newsletter, I don’t know what to tell you. Sorry, I guess?

---

---

Oh hey. You made it to the end. Sorry it’s been so long. Been working on S(h)ibboleth (and, horrifyingly, a day job). Plus it seems like there is just too much news that actually appalling coming out every day, and one gets a little paralysed. Hope you are keeping above water in all of it. We have to retain hope.