As Bono now knows, you criticise Hamas at your peril

Bono’s getting flak again. What’s he done now? Foisted another U2 album on iPhone users? Donned his expensive shades for yet another gurning selfie with some president or pope? Nope, it’s far worse than that – he criticised Hamas.

Yes, the U2 frontman is getting it in the neck for calling Hamas ‘evil’. It was in a statement issued at the start of this week. After nearly two years of being harangued by the keffiyeh knobs who clog up the cultural establishment, all of them wailing ‘When will U2 speak about the genocide?!’, the band buckled. But it wasn’t enough to satiate the fury of the Israel haters. In fact it riled them even more. For Bono made the fatal mistake of reminding folk that an army of Jew-loathing lunatics started this infernal war, and its name is Hamas.

Under the title ‘On Gaza’, all four band members offered their thoughts. It’s mostly typical Boomer fare on the horribleness of war. But then there’s the Hamas slamming. It is a testament to the choking conformism of our Israelophobic moment that it feels balls-out radical to see a rock act criticise that neo-fascist militia. Drummer Larry Mullen Jnr even opens his remarks with a furious dig at the ‘Hamas-led massacre of Israelis’ when ‘innocent music fans [were] slaughtered, beaten and abused at the Nova music festival’. He goes on to rail against Israel, natch, but my mouth was nonetheless agape: a musician mentioning the savagery at Nova? Can it be?

It is Bono’s comment that is most striking. He lays into Israel, which is what the pitchfork-wavers wanted. But he lays into Hamas, too. ‘The rape, murder and abduction of Israelis at the Nova music festival was evil’, he says. He dares to humanise the youth of Nova. They were ‘music lovers and fans like us’, he says. It feels like sweet moral relief from the anti-Semitic damning of those dancers in the desert as ‘settler-colonialists’ who had it coming. To think of those kids ‘hiding under a stage in Kibbutz Re’im’ is awful, writes Bono. And then they were ‘butchered’ by Hamas, he says, to ‘set a diabolical trap for Israel and to get a war going that might just redraw the map from “the river to the sea”… a gamble Hamas’s leadership were willing to play with the lives of two million Palestinians’.

I’ve done my fair share of Bono-bashing, but I’ll admit it: there is great moral clarity here. Bono recognises that Hamas started this war, that it did so with the aim of erasing Israel, and that it has zero regard for the Palestinians sacrificed at the altar of its psychotic anti-Semitic dream. ‘Yahya Sinwar didn’t mind if he lost the battle or even the war if he could destroy Israel as a moral as well as an economic force’, says Bono. His terrorists ‘deliberately positioned themselves under civilian targets’, he says, ‘having tunnelled their way from school to mosque to hospital’. Why would a terror outfit behave so insanely? Check out its charter, says Bono. ‘It’s an evil read.’

He then turns his guns on Benjamin Netanyahu. Under his rule, what was ‘once an oasis of innovation and free-thinking’ in the Middle East risks falling under the spell of ‘a fundamentalism as blunt as a machete’. He goes way over the top, accusing Netanyahu’s Israel of a ‘depravity and lawlessness’ that ‘feels like uncharted territory’. If he thought such stinging words would placate the keffiyeh mob demanding he take the knee to their demented animus for Israel, he was mistaken. They’ve still found him guilty of the greatest sin in the era of Israelophobia: nuance.

The backlash has been mad. Bono’s statement is ‘word soup’, says the Twittermob. It’s ‘billionaire pacifism’. He’s making excuses for Israel, the nutters cry, having clearly been brainwashed by its ‘right to self-defence’ blather. Yes, how mad to think the Jewish State should have the right to defend itself from an army of anti-Semites hell-bent on its obliteration. Some accuse U2 of ‘dripping in Israeli blood money’, because of course the only reason someone would slam Hamas and defend ‘Israel’s right to exist’ is because they’d been thrown a few shekels.

The Irish Independent wonders if Bono’s comments are ‘too little, too late’. It reports on the ‘furious’ response to his statement, including from academics in Dublin who say he’s giving too much ‘justification for Israel’. Irish singer Mary Coughlan branded Bono’s statement ‘very, very weak [and] very, very measured’. Measured! What a crime. Music journalist Louise Bruton said Bono should have been braver, sooner, like Kneecap.

And there you have it. We must cheer the hip-hop trio who celebrated the butchery of 7 October 2023 by posting a photo of themselves grinning like loons alongside the words ‘Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle’ on 8 October. And we must condemn the band that says Hamas is ‘evil’. Bow down to the balaclava-wearing eejits who yelp ‘Up Hamas’ and rage against the old guard of Irish rock who rightly accuse Hamas of racist mass murder. Cosy up to neo-fascists and you’re a hero – criticise neo-fascists and you’re clearly a blood-moneyed billionaire who deserves public shaming.

You couldn’t ask for better proof that popular culture has fallen under the spell not only of Israelophobia but of Islamo-fascism itself. The slavish conformism of the anti-Israel mania has blinded the cultural elites to balance, truth and basic moral decency. Bono’s true transgression is that he says he didn’t ‘speak out’ earlier because he felt ‘uncertainty in the face of obvious complexity’. Uncertainty? Complexity? These are verboten emotions under the rule of the keffiyeh mob. Only the most brutally reductive and fact-lite posturing is permitted. Israel is evil. Gaza is innocent. The End. Deviate from these cultish diktats forged more from bigotry than reality and you will be branded one of the Jews’ money-grubbing stooges.

Hopefully, Bono now knows there is no appeasing the neo-religious fury of Israelophobia. Only obsequious prostration before their commandments of loathing for Israel will suffice. 7 October was designed to ‘sow the seeds for a global intifada’, he said in his statement. Indeed – and the fruits of that global intifada can be seen in the fact that even an established rocker like you now criticises Jew-killers at your peril. Forget slamming Israel for likes, guys. It won’t work. Instead turn your ire on that very ‘global intifada’ that poses such a dire threat to Jews, liberty, the souls of our young and culture itself.

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