What The Hell America!

There was a time when pop stars could oppose horrifying campaigns of mass murder without facing an orchestrated backlash. In 1995, U2 released one of their best songs, “Miss Sarajevo,” a collaboration with Brian Eno and Luciano Pavarotti that was intended to draw people’s attention to the destruction of Bosnia by Serb nationalist forces. The lyrics began with a set of rhetorical questions:

Is there a time for keeping your distance?

A time to turn your eyes away?

Is there a time for keeping your head down?

For getting on with your day?

What might Bono have said about a globally popular musician who went to Belgrade to receive an award from Slobodan Milošević while Sarajevo was still under siege? Would that have been morally worse than “keeping your head down” or “getting on with your day”?

The U2 singer made a trip of his own to Washington in January this year so that Joe Biden could give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the dying days of his administration. The relationship between Biden and the Israeli forces responsible for mass killing in Palestine was, if anything, more intimate and legally actionable than the relationship between Milošević and the Republika Srpska forces responsible for mass killing in Bosnia. That did not deter Ireland’s most famous rockstar from accepting Biden’s endorsement.

In an article for the Atlantic to mark the occasion, Bono briefly referred to “an obscene leveling of civilian life” in Gaza — a strange choice of verb, more commonly associated with the destruction of buildings than the death of human beings, and without the straightforward legal implications of “killing,” let alone “murdering.” Having identified “Vladimir Putin’s guns and bombs” as the menace facing the people of Ukraine, Bono’s article refrained from mentioning the US-made guns and bombs that Israel’s military has been using to “level” Palestinians for the best part of two years. In any case, there was no talk of Gaza, however imprecise, when he received his bauble in the White House.

In 1995, the author of “Miss Sarajevo” would probably have found it hard to imagine a UK tour involving a Serbian musician who had recently performed for his countrymen taking part in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia. The Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood did his best to deliver a contemporary equivalent by arranging a series of concerts with the Israeli singer Dudu Tassa. In December 2023, when there was no room for doubt about the deliberate mass killing of civilians in Gaza, Tassa played to Israeli soldiers to help boost their morale before they returned to Gaza for another bout of war crimes.

When British venues canceled the Greenwood–Tassa gigs under pressure from Palestine solidarity activists, the two musicians put out a statement presenting themselves as victims of “censorship and silencing,” displaying the kind of all-encompassing narcissism that might swallow a planet whole. Unsurprisingly, the Guardian reported on their complaints without bothering to mention Tassa’s service as a busker for genocide.

Unlike Bono or Greenwood, the members of Kneecap have not acquired vast personal fortunes from their time in the music industry, and the chances are they never will. The internet has transformed the economics of the business beyond recognition since the release of mega-selling albums like Achtung Baby and OK Computer. Besides, the market for an Irish-language hip-hop group with a sharp political edge is always going to be more limited than the audience for Anglophone stadium rock was during the 1980s and ’90s.

In other words, they have much more to lose if they’re prevented from touring and building on their (relatively modest) success to date. Those considerations didn’t stop the group from projecting the following message on a big screen during their set at the Coachella festival a month ago:

Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people: It is being enabled by the US government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes.

Fuck Israel. Free Palestine.

The response they have faced on both sides of the Atlantic, culminating in a police investigation, is an attempt to punish them for stating the facts about Israel’s conduct in Gaza with the appropriate degree of anger.

In the wake of the Coachella display, supporters of Israel combed through Kneecap’s back catalogue of performances in search of something they could use to attack the band without having to acknowledge the charge of genocide, against which there is no credible defense. London’s Metropolitan Police have now accused Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who goes by the name “Mo Chara” (“my friend”) when performing, of waving a Hezbollah flag during a gig last November “in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a supporter of a proscribed organisation.”

The members of the band have vowed to contest the charge in court: “We deny this ‘offense’ and will vehemently defend ourselves.” As such, they need to choose their words carefully and deal with the law as it is and not as they would like it to be. Others can speak more bluntly and point out that the entire premise of the case is a travesty. The British state has no moral standing to put anyone on trial for “supporting terrorism.”

It shouldn’t matter if Ó hAnnaidh had expressed clear, enthusiastic support for Hezbollah, speaking at length in a way that left no room for misunderstanding. There should be no legal consequences whatsoever for speech of that kind, let alone for waving a flag. In the lexicon of British politics, “terrorist” is a playground insult with no objective meaning. It certainly has nothing to do with violence against noncombatants, since British governments have been happy to entertain Israeli politicians who are responsible for the mass killing of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

The people of West Belfast, the community that produced Kneecap, repeatedly elected Gerry Adams as their MP at a time when the British establishment considered him to be the physical embodiment of terrorism. During the same period, Britain’s state security forces were systematically collaborating with loyalist paramilitaries responsible for hundreds of sectarian killings.

Government ministers like the current Northern Ireland secretary Hilary Benn are still fighting to prevent the truth about state collusion from coming out, long after the Irish Republican Army ended its campaign and Adams became a regular guest at Downing Street and the White House. When British politicians and media commentators engage in strident moralizing about the evils of terrorism, the response of most people in West Belfast is to roll their eyes in contempt.

The week before the Metropolitan Police charged Ó hAnnaidh, London’s British Museum hosted a private party to celebrate the seventy-seventh anniversary of Israel’s foundation. The guests included Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage of Reform UK, and the Labour politician Maria Eagle, who was there to represent Keir Starmer’s government.

Eagle boasted that the Royal Air Force has been running surveillance flights over Gaza to assist the Israeli military. She claimed that this was “in support of hostage rescue efforts,” knowing perfectly well that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government couldn’t care less about the hostages in Gaza.

The keynote speech at the event came from Netanyahu’s ambassador Tzipi Hotovely. Hotovely is a boorish racist with no diplomatic skills whatsoever who has always denied the right of Palestine to exist. She once told an interviewer that Israel would have to destroy “every school, every mosque, every second house” in Gaza. If a normal country had appointed her as its representative, it would have been a public relations catastrophe.

But this is Israel we are talking about, so the British political class has continued to fawn over her, no matter how many times she lashes out abusively at its own members. Her most recent gaffe was to accuse the London mayor Sadiq Khan of “spouting Hamas propaganda” when he noted that more than fifty thousand Palestinians have now been killed in Gaza. Khan did not even point the finger directly at the guilty parties, but his reference to “the appalling suffering and killing that continues in Sudan and Palestine” was too much for Hotovely to bear.

This would have been the clumsiest intervention of the month from Israel’s local auxiliaries were it not for the comments of Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, who claimed that starving the people of Gaza might be an act of kindness that leads to reduced obesity levels. Turner, whose group took legal action against the Starmer government when it imposed partial limitations on the supply of weapons to Israel, will certainly not be investigated by the Metropolitan Police for “supporting terrorism.”

Meanwhile, a coalition of human rights organizations has brought a case before the High Court in London to challenge the ongoing transfer of British-made components for F-35 warplanes that Israel is using to drop bombs on Gaza. Government lawyers claimed to have seen no evidence that Israeli forces were deliberately targeting civilians.

The court has heard testimony from Mark Perlmutter, a US doctor who volunteered in Gaza. Perlmutter reported having seen many dead or injured children whose wounds indicated that Israeli soldiers had carefully picked them out as targets:

For example, I evaluated two children that were snipered twice each. Both received central chest wounds and side of the head wounds which meant the child was shot a second time after they died and probably were already on the ground. These two children were shot so perfectly in the chest that I couldn’t have put my stethoscope over their hearts more accurately.

This is the “war” that the British state has been supporting with every tool in its kit, including the criminalization of domestic dissenters.

The legal move against Kneecap came just days after the BBC shunted Gary Lineker out of his job as a TV presenter because he was too outspoken about the slaughter in Gaza. Lineker’s experience speaks volumes about the state of British public discourse when it comes to Israel, for two main reasons.

First of all, Lineker is the most congenial front man you could possibly imagine for a pro-Palestinian viewpoint. Those unfamiliar with his role in British culture might care to picture a cross between Tom Hanks and Michael Jordan. He famously went through his entire career as one of England’s greatest soccer players without acquiring a single booking for disciplinary infractions. After retirement, he became the jovial face of BBC sports coverage for the best part of thirty years.

Before Lineker started talking about Palestine, the most controversial incident in his whole career was probably the time when he honored a pledge to present Match of the Day in his underwear after Leicester City’s unlikely Premier League victory in 2016. None of this sufficed to protect him from sustained vilification as he made the abrupt shift from national treasure to hate figure of the right-wing press.

Secondly, Lineker is a useful case study because he is a liberal who does not make his living from the world of politics. Of course, Britain is full of people like that, but most of them do not have a national profile that brings their perspective to the attention of millions. Politicians, newspaper columnists, and the like tend to prefer the argument of power to the power of argument, so they are extremely reluctant to apply basic liberal principles to Israel’s track record for fear that it would lead them to the same conclusions as Lineker.

The pretext that BBC managers used for finally ousting Lineker would not even qualify as a fig leaf in a more serious public sphere. On his Instagram account, he shared a post that featured a short video of Canadian-Palestinian lawyer Diana Buttu explaining what the Zionist state-building project has entailed for Palestinians. There was nothing remotely objectionable in what Buttu said. The account that reposted the video had placed a small emoji of a rodent outside the frame — it was easy to miss, even if the intention behind it was to conjure up old antisemitic imagery depicting Jews as rats, which was far from clear.

Lineker faced a barrage of criticism from detractors who accused him of circulating Nazi-style propaganda. He deleted the post and recorded a video apologizing for it, explaining that he had not seen the offending emoji, which was far more than he needed to do under the circumstances. As we have seen in so many similar cases, from Ilhan Omar to Jeremy Corbyn, Lineker’s critics merely banked the apology as a confession of guilt to the most extravagant charges while continuing to attack him.

There was a palpable sense of relief among senior BBC officials that they could now speed up Lineker’s departure while generating headlines that contained the term “antisemitism.” Articles discussing the end of Lineker’s BBC career studiously avoided mentioning the actual reason for it, which was understood by all. A sleazy, mendacious hit job from the BBC’s own media editor inadvertently stumbled upon the truth as it sought to present Lineker as the author of his own downfall: “He could not keep quiet. In the end, it brought him down.”

While pontificating about the urgent need for “impartiality,” even on the part of sports presenters as they speak in a personal capacity, the people who run the BBC have inflicted lasting damage on its reputation for producing serious journalism. Managers have given a single, egregiously partisan editor license to micromanage stories about Palestine for the world’s most popular news website.

Of course, the real issue here is not the bias of one person — it is the organizational structure that has allowed them to become so influential. At time of writing, the BBC is still refusing to broadcast a film it commissioned about the experience of medical workers in Gaza. Other British broadcasters have followed in the BBC’s footsteps, taking their line from a political class that has provided material support for genocide.

After Starmer issued his joint statement with Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney earlier this week, Netanyahu responded with a typically petulant and deceitful whine: “When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice.” It was a telling point, though not in the way that Netanyahu intended.

Since October 2023, he has unleashed a gang of sadistic killers on the people of Gaza, inciting them to commit horrific crimes. The main “concrete action” Western leaders should be discussing at this point in time is how to bring the Israeli leader to justice and ensure that he spends the rest of his life in a prison cell.

When a man like Netanyahu has good reason to thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice and the wrong side of history. Starmer and his allies will never be able to wash away the stain of complicity after what they have done.