Kneecap: please don’t make martyrs of these muppets

Like all lame white kids who larp as rebels, Kneecap love to say ‘Fuck the police’. Cops are ‘scumbags’ who ‘make my balls shiver’, they growl on one of their shit tracks, no doubt to the great titillation of the flapper-girl socialists and mullet-sporting Politics Joe dweebs who make up their fanbase. And yet those ‘scumbags’ have done the hip-hop trio a solid. In bringing terror charges against band member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, ‘the filth’ have made these balaclava bores look like rebels. They’ve made martyrs of muppets. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to them.

Ó hAnnaidh, who performs under the name Mo Chara, was charged by the Metropolitan Police earlier this month. He’s accused of displaying the flag of a proscribed organisation – Hezbollah – at a gig in London last year. There’s not much one can say about the case at this stage. But I think I can say this: it’s the greatest gift Kneecap could have asked for. Just like that, the Provo-cosplaying pricks who’ve never once expressed a view that wouldn’t win raucous applause at the Guardian Christmas party have been made to look like dangerous subversives. It’s a reminder of yet another of censorship’s downsides: it makes heroes of arseholes.

As everyone will now know, courtesy of the Met, Kneecap are a hip-hop act from Belfast and Derry. One wears a tricolor tea cosy on his head. He’s nearly 40. They love drugs and hate Israel. They’re that edgy. One has an Irish slang word for MDMA tattooed across his chest, which made me cringe so hard my sciatica nearly came back. Last week, they told 20,000 ponces at a festival in Brockwell Park in London that Israelis are ‘murderous fucking religious fanatics’ and ‘cunts’. The crowd went wild. Of course they did. Nothing thrills the turbo-smug wing of the English middle class as much as a spot of sweary anti-Israel bigotry.

Kneecap have always faced a problem: they larp as a cocky menace to the establishment and yet the establishment loves them. The Oxbridge classes can’t get enough of the three faux Fenians. The Observer dispatched one of its hacks to meet them in Belfast last year. It was more anthropology than journalism. They ‘bowl’ into the pub with grins ‘like a smiley shark’ and wax lyrical about ‘MDMA and Guinness’, she gleefully informed Britain’s brunching classes. Her piece was illustrated with a pic of the ‘revolutionary’ rappers downing pints of the black stuff. The twat in the tea cosy was balancing his Guinness on his head. ‘Look at these hilarious fucking Micks!’ should have been the headline.

The Irish Times fawns over them. They’re ‘the lads we want representing us’, says one of its self-confessed ‘middle-class millennial’ writers. ‘They’re less “Westlife key changes” and more “West Belfast taking bumps of cocaine off a key”’, she gushed. Sweet Jesus, is that the worst sentence you’ve ever read or what? Rolling Stone says they’re a spunky new manifestation of ‘Irish rebel music’. ‘You’ll find me in a snug of a dimly lit shit pub / Seeing how fucked I can get on government funds’ – it’s hardly ‘The Fields of Athenry’, is it?

Privileged youths love them. The boho rich girls of Coachella whooped with delight when they said ‘Fuck Israel’ during their set there. The wet-left nerds of Joe gush over their celebration of Irish ‘identity’. You’ll see Trinity kids in Dublin wearing their merch, like their bucket hat that says ‘Your sniffer dogs are shite’. You can buy it from their website where instead of saying ‘Add to basket’ it says ‘Add to loot’ – put me out of my misery, someone. BAFTA and every broadsheet loved their film. Of course they did. It’s basically a bourgeois paean to minority languages and the recovery of the self from the trauma of history. Imagine an Open University lecture with the word cunt in it.

That’s why the cultural elite falls at Kneecap’s feet: because from behind their daft Provo headgear they spout every insipid orthodoxy of our time. They think Israel are ‘cunts’, as does every Sally Rooney-reading, meat-dodging tosser in Dublin and London. They wear the keffiyeh, which is all but mandatory in middle-class circles. They wang on about cultural identity and the mental-health crisis. None of this threatens the establishment – it is the establishment. Irish rebel songs were about the uprisings of pissed-off people – Kneecap’s raps are about taking ket and feeling sorry for yourself. They embody the contemporary Irish elites’ depthless capacity for self-pity combined with a haughty ethno-narcissism that makes these people think they can wag a finger at states they hate, like Israel.

And then the Met comes along and gives Kneecap the thing it lacked: a real frisson of danger. These terror charges mean that a band beloved of the sons and daughters of the British establishment can pose as a Mick thorn in the side of the British establishment. That the Met is the only wing of the elite that bristles at the band, while everyone else from the courts to the cultural world to the media establishment laps up their larp, is immaterial: Kneecap will dine out on this ‘persecution’ by ‘the Brits’ for the rest of their days, and their fans will love it. Charging people over their alleged speech is wrong for so many reasons. One of those reasons is that people who talk bollocks get to cosplay as modern-day Thomas Paines when the state feels their collars. Censorship insults the public and makes wankers into martyrs.

They’re all hypocrites, of course. The overeducated squares standing up for Kneecap’s liberty to rap are the kind of people who will gleefully blacklist a feminist who says you can’t have a cock and be a lesbian and who openly agitate for the silencing of artists from Israel. Indeed, the same people bemoaning the cancellation of Kneecap gigs actively campaigned for the cancellation of performances by Jonny Greenwood and Dudu Tassa, all because Tassa is Israeli. If you defend freedom of speech for people you like but deny it to Jews from Israel, you know what you are? I’ll borrow a word Kneecap loves: a cunt.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy