Bob Vylan, Glastonbury and the banality of Jew hatred

If you can’t see it now, you never will. The sight of tens of thousands of people at Glastonbury yesterday joining in a spirited chant of ‘Death, death to the IDF’ was the sight of us officially becoming a very different country, I fear. One in which anti-Israel hysteria has so flawlessly rehabilitated Jew hatred that it has become unthinking, conformist, almost mundane. Something that Home Counties idiots can jive to before adjusting their hot pants and heading off to catch Charli XCX. Something that is broadcast by the BBC into millions of homes. The banality of the new anti-Semitism.

Let’s not muck about here. When punk-rap duo Bob Vylan called for the killing of Israeli soldiers yesterday – as they warmed up the crowd at the West Holts Stage for every Israelophobe’s new favourite Irish rap trio, Kneecap – they weren’t opposing war. They were calling for war, and on the one army on Earth charged with protecting Jews from genocide. The army now at war with a jihadist cult that murdered, raped and kidnapped its way through an Israeli festival not unlike Glastonbury on 7 October 2023. The army that almost all Israelis are expected to serve in. Indeed, those making excuses for that sickening call-and-response yesterday hopefully don’t know that Hamas justifies killing Israeli civilians on the grounds that they are basically all tainted by national service. That they are all enemy combatants. Death, death to that IDF?

Whether we got here by ignorance or conscious hatred is pretty much moot. The end result is British Jews – at Glasto or at home – watching thousands whoop as Jew-killing slogans are recited. Frontman Bobby Vylan also treated the crowd to a deranged rant about the indignities he suffered working for a ‘Zionist’ at a record label, because he had to listen to his boss talk favourably about Israel. I wonder if he knows that the vast majority of British Jews are Zionists. I wonder if he cares. ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, Vylan chanted at another point in his fetid little set. Surely he knows what this means? Surely he recalls the tiny, 10million-strong nation that lies between the River Jordan and the Med, 74 per cent of which is Jewish? Surely he knows that when the Islamofascists currently menacing Israel chant it they are explicitly calling for the genocide of Jews? Bob?

In a way, the murderous rantings of that cunt turn my stomach less than the roaring adulation of the crowd. After 7 October, we knew how the leftists and the Islamists were going to respond. They showed us who they really were a long time ago, and true to form, they’ve been subjecting us to carnivals of anti-Semitism on our streets for almost two years now. Depressingly, that was all priced in. What’s been most striking is how supposedly ‘respectable’ bourgeois opinion more broadly has shifted so violently against Israel – and the Jews. The sort of people who might previously have deferred to the Israel haters while also mumbling something about it being complicated have been radicalised by the Hamas propaganda in their feeds. The Gail’s crowd, the Glastonbury goers, have imbibed the poison fully now. Screaming blood libels against the world’s only Jewish nation is now what it means to be a Good Person. To be on the ‘right side of history’ is to rail against Those People.

We have a cultural set that, above all else, defines itself as implacable warriors against racism. And yet not only have these people been silent about the horrific return of militarised anti-Semitism, to smashed glass in Jewish areas, to firebombings on synagogues and Jews from Colorado to Sydney, they have been giving it moral succour. Amid the most violent explosion of racism for many decades, an alarmingly high number of the ‘anti-racists’ aren’t just silent about it. They are providing cover for it. They are condoning it. They are participating in it.

British Jews have known for some time that they cannot rely on that lot for solidarity. All the more reason for the sane, truly anti-racist majority – those who can see what is going on and are quietly horrified by it – to stand with their Jewish brothers and sisters, loudly and proudly. This really isn’t their problem. It’s ours.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater