Israel, the U.K. government and the media are fomenting moral panic over words “glorifying violence” towards the IDF while the Israeli military inflicts carnage in Gaza and the region.
British punk-rapper band Bob Vylan at Full Force 2022 in Ferropolis, Germany. (Stefan Bollmann/ Wikimedia Commons)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressed predictable outrage at the weekend that the BBC had inadvertently broadcast punk band Bob Vylan leading crowds at Glastonbury in a chant of “Death to the IDF” – the “Israel Defence Forces” that have been responsible for slaughtering many tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza over the past 21 months.
He called the chant “appalling hate speech” — apparently unaware that there are far worse crimes than hating soldiers carrying out the mass slaughter of children. Those worse things, of course, include slaughtering children en masse.
The BBC apologised, calling the band’s comments “deeply offensive” – more offensive, apparently, than Israel bombing and starving the children of Gaza.
“But have you heard this one tho”? pic.twitter.com/7pNSRn0i6l
— ???? ????????? (@aldnmarki) June 30, 2025
Glastonbury’s organisers condemned the chant, saying there was no space for “hate speech or antisemitism” — apparently assuming, wrongly, that all Jews identify not just with the state of Israel but with an Israeli military widely accused by genocide experts of committing genocidal violence in Gaza.
I’m a British Jew in England
I didn’t interpret #DeathToTheIDF as a call for people to kill me because
1. I’m not in the IDF
2. It doesn’t call for the death of individuals – the clue is in “The IDF”
3. I’m not brain dead
— Stop The Bollocks with Mirabel (@MirabelTweets1) June 29, 2025
Police are investigating Bob Vylan, a musical duo, to see whether they have committed a criminal offence, or possibly a terrorist one. As far as we know, the same police are doing nothing to investigate some 10 British citizens known to have travelled abroad to join the Israeli military, the IDF, committing the Gaza genocide.
[On Monday, the U.S. State Department cancelled the group’s visas ahead of a U.S. tour scheduled to begin in the fall and United Talent Agency dropped the duo, according to The Hollywood Reporter.]
On Sunday, the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire grilled Starmer’s health secretary, Wes Streeting, on remarks from the Israeli embassy in London condemning what it termed “the normalisation of extremist language” and the “glorification of violence” at Glastonbury.
Unexpectedly, Streeting avoided jumping whole-heartedly on the media outrage band-wagon, led by the Mail on Sunday, whose front page demanded the arrest of the two band members for what the paper wrongly described as a chant demanding “Death to Israelis”.
The Mail, apparently, believes that all Israelis, presumably including the country’s children, are currently serving in the Israeli military.
“I’d say to the Israeli embassy, get your own house in order”
Health Secretary Wes Streeting responds to Israel’s claims on Glastonbury’s “glorification of violence”, saying “Israeli settler terrorists” carried out “unwanton acts of violence”#BBCLauraKhttps://t.co/v2HwddQuYEpic.twitter.com/DRoqBMrVM6
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) June 29, 2025
There are four important points to make about the interview between Derbyshire and Streeting:
1. The Israeli embassy in London, like the Israeli government it represents, has precisely no concerns about the “glorification of violence” when Israel is doing either the glorifying or the violence.
Israel is currently celebrating its “success” in slaughtering and maiming hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, including huge numbers of children; attacks by its soldiers and state-backed Jewish settler militias on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank; its eradication of whole communities in Lebanon; and its bombing of residential tower blocks across Tehran, killing many hundreds.
Violence has been Israel’s signature policy for the past 21 months — and long before that. Israel has revelled in the carnage it has inflicted on populations across the region.
In a post on social media, the Israeli embassy additionally argued of Bob Vylan’s chant:
“When speech crosses into incitement, hatred, and advocacy of ethnic cleansing, it must be called out — especially when amplified by public figures on prominent platforms.”
And yet public figures from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Starmer have incited against the Palestinians, with Netanyahu comparing them to “Amalek”, a people the Israelites were commanded by God to exterminate, and Starmer terming the wholesale starvation of the people of Gaza an act by Israel of “self-defence”.
Israeli officials from Netanyahu down have advocated the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And, even more seriously, Israel has not just threatened but repeatedly carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under its belligerent rule.
An aerial view on Jan. 21 showing destruction in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip. (UNRWA/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0)
2. It is beyond ridiculous for the BBC to echo the Israeli government in prioritising a harsh crackdown on words at Glastonbury “glorifying violence” towards Israeli soldiers ahead of the actual violence of genocide being committed by those Israel soldiers.
The BBC has avoided criticising the Israeli government for its actual violence — its bombing and active starvation of Palestinian civilians — and the Starmer government for colluding in that violence, or what the International Court of Justice termed more than a year ago a “plausible” genocide by Israel.
As a recent report by the Centre for Media Monitoring confirmed, the BBC has dramatically skewed its language to present Israel, the aggressor, in a more favourable light than the victim, the Palestinians of Gaza. The BBC’s own whistleblowing journalists have warned that the state broadcaster has all but banned the use of the word “genocide”, even by experts on the matter.
[See: Jonathan Cook: The BBC’s Complicity in Genocide]
By arming Israel, by organising spy flights over Gaza from RAF base Akrotiri on Cyprus, and by providing diplomatic cover, Starmer has effectively glorified Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian children in the enclave.
Bob Vylan’s chants of “Death to the IDF” have a far more dangerous counterpart in Starmer’s recital of Israel’s “right to defend itself” when that “defence” involves Israel mercilessly starving Gaza’s population of food, water and power.
Bob Vylan are a punk band; Starmer is the British prime minister, the man who directs Britain’s foreign policy and directs its army.
No one, least of all the BBC, has held Israeli or British officials accountable not just for glorifying violence but for actually carrying it out on an industrial scale for nearly two years.
But the BBC is suddenly interested in holding to account two punk musicians for leading a chant — one that made a symbolic, hypothetical threat of violence — against an Israeli military carrying out the ultimate form of violence, an actual genocide.
In a serious media, Israel’s supposed “concerns” about the glorification of violence and extremist language would be laughed off the stage rather than respectfully aired.
3. Streeting is being congratulated and condemned in equal measure on social media for refusing to be drawn into the Mail and BBC’s confected outrage. “I’d say to the Israeli embassy, get your own house in order,” he responded to Derbyshire. But hang on a minute. Streeting’s resistance to Derbyshire’s line of questioning was perhaps unexpected. But it also, let us not forget, serves the interests of both the Starmer and Israeli governments.
Streeting’s insistence that Israel “get its house in order” had, as he made clear, nothing to do with its 21-month slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. Starmer is still defining the Gaza genocide as Israel’s supposed “right to defend itself.”
In responding to Derbyshire, Streeting expressed concern only at what he called violent “settler attacks” in the West Bank. He said the Israeli embassy needed to “get your own house in order in terms of the conduct of your own citizens and the settlers in the West Bank.”
This was intended purely as deflection, designed to serve Starmer and Israel, the West’s key client state in the oil-rich Middle East. It benefits the U.K. government to make an issue of West Bank settler attacks — and present them as disorganised, random violence by individual extremists that the Israeli government is not responsible for but needs to get a firmer grip on.
By highlighting problems in the West Bank, the Starmer government can avoid addressing the genocide in Gaza and the Israeli state’s clear responsibility for that genocide. Which is precisely why in recent weeks Britain has made so much noise about imposing feeble penalties on a handful of extremist settlers and two fascist ministers in Netanyahu’s government that represent those settlers.
Starmer and Streeting’s prioritising of Israel’s West Bank violence over Israel’s Gaza violence is a switch and bait twice over.
Most of the violence in the West Bank is not coming from settler extremists, even though they are the ones being punished by the U.K. It is coming from the Israeli military, which has bulldozed thousands of homes there over the past year, driving 40,000 Palestinians off their lands.
Further, settler violence is not random. It is coordinated with Israeli field commanders, many of them settlers themselves, to uproot Palestinians so that Israel can move in Jewish settlers to colonise the land — or, in the words of successive Israeli governments, “Judaise” it.
None of this is new either. Israel has engineered and imposed a violent, apartheid system on Palestinians for decades to make life unbearable and encourage them to leave their homeland.
Second, Glastonbury’s anger-fuelled chant against the IDF was not primarily motivated by Israel’s violent actions in the West Bank. It was against the Israeli military for committing a genocide in Gaza, which the British government has been supporting.
Streeting’s aim was to drag the debate on to safer territory for him and Starmer: that Britain needs to deal not with a genocide in Gaza but with a handful of violent loons in the West Bank.
Crowd gathered at the highest point in the farm at Glastonbury festival, June 2016. (Czampal/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
Even in criticising the Israeli government for not doing enough to tackle settler violence, Streeting is still operating within the confines of a public discourse dictated by Israel, which prefers any criticism to be directed at individuals not at the Israeli state behind those individuals.
4. The BBC, the Starmer government and the Israel lobby are all delighted to play their part in this game of deflection and deception because these kinds of moral panics obscure the real issue: that all these parties are actively colluding in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
While the media and government can now have a long backwards and forwards about whether criticism of Israel’s genocidal army needs to be defined in law as a criminal offence or “terrorism”, Israel will get a free pass to continue with the real terrorism: a genocide in Gaza.
Famously, the black civil rights fighter Malcolm X observed of the role of the media:
“They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. … If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
Sixty years on, nothing has changed.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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In targetting the 5000 Hamas fighters who attacked (broke out) on Oct 7 and most of whom were killed immediately, around 60,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered and 100-200,000 maimed (please ignore these numbers which the BBC and IDF will tell you are made up by the Hamas run health service and cannot possibly be trusted – and who will help them when Western societies cannot look after their own disabled by natural causes?) with the rest made to go here, there, North, South – no East or West – beg for food and medicine, and fear not a sniper’s bullet because that might be a short-lived pain, not to mention the total destruction of 70 years’ effort to construct a survivable living space – already knocked down and rebuilt several times – and we are meant to believe that it is all down to the humanitarian efforts of the IDF – and there are the most humanitarian people on the planet who happen to be Jewish who refute this. In Britain is a similar Ministry of Defence (Hitler’s military did not hide behind such semantics) now believing that tactical nuclear armaments to add to all the others will defend and save the planet.
As I posted on Mr. Cook’s blog, I researched solid Jewish sources re: Amalek. It’s not clear who they were. Furthermore, in the Aggadah, which is exegesis–interpretations of the meanings of law and of life–the alleged commandment is shown to be unclear as well. Point is Netanyahu isn’t justified by an appeal to tradition.
And since when have punk bands been known for their decorum and patriotism anyway? Imagine instead a 1930s-40s swing band were playing and they called for “death to the Wehrmacht” while vehemently denouncing the genocidal extermination of Jews (and others.) Notice no general condemnation of all Germans. Would that also be considered “appalling hate speech,” “glorification of violence,” and “deeply offensive,” thus requiring harsh state censorship?
More Words! Words! Words!
In stunning contrast, as Ahmad Ibsais says in a recent article in The Guardian. “Military intervention to defend Gaza is not only justified — it is required.”
To those who would argue that no country would even contemplate military intervention to defend Gaza, Ibsais, a first-generation Palestinian American and law student, offers a sample of counter-arguments:
1/ ‘Military intervention is not some imperial fantasy we borrow from the west. It is a mechanism built into the very structure of international law.’
2/ Article I of the genocide convention requires states not only to punish genocide but to prevent it. The responsibility to protect doctrine (R2P), adopted in 2005 by every member of the United Nations, asserts that when a state is “manifestly failing” to protect its population – or, as in our case, actively trying to destroy it – other states are obligated to intervene, not encouraged, obligated.
3/ And yes, there is precedent. In Kosovo, NATO intervened in 1999 after mass killings and the threat of further ethnic cleansing. In East Timor, a multinational force deployed to halt atrocities committed by militias supported by the Indonesian army. In Libya, security council resolution 1973 authorized military action “to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack”.
Military intervention is not violence – it is what stops violence. It is not the failure of law – it is its fulfillment
We truly live in Orwellian times: war is peace; censorship is free speech; overthrowing foreign governments is protecting democracy; the ruling class cares about the rest of society; international law is only relevant when we decide it is . . . . I could go on. Hats off to Bob Vylan.
I’m 70 years old and was born in the U.S. This era of speech regulation behind the force of law, is surreal. This is what I was told was the mark of totalitarianism, was what the USSR did routinely, all my life, in the classroom, in the church pew, on the TV and in every newspaper and magazine that was available. I think what takes this to a mind boggling level is the fact that the world including a majority of the west’s citizens, is reinforcing the messaging that was drummed into me, and the western governments are the bogeyman. How, I wonder, do these rogue states regain their credibility and the confidence of their people? This is unchartered territory that cannot be normalized. Where will I be standing when the song ends?
The majority of the Western youth along with global youth in general see this bloody charade for what it is and are having none of it, thus the extreme crackdown on speech. The clueless court jesters in these obedient to Zionism governments still don’t comprehend the paradigm shift taking place. Or if they do, believe they can stop it. This empire’s bloody end is near. It won’t go down without causing major problems for us all, but down it will go.
It does seem possible Lois. And if it doesn’t self implode, then the climate chaos will finish the job.
“DEATH, DEATH, TO THE GESTAPO/SS!”
In the 1930s and ’40s, would it have been apt to label such chants “anti-Germanic?”
Many artists spoke out against the Third Reich during last century’s Holocaust, condemning it and calling for its demise — and yet no one accused them of calling for the death of the German people.
No one tried to smear them as “anti-Germanic” bigots, for a very simple reason: They weren’t engaging in “hate speech” any more than Bob Vylan was spewing “hate” at the recent concert in the U.K.
The proof: The crowd responded very positively, echoing his call, “Death, death, to the IDF!”
It is impossible to imagine such a positive response from the crowd of progressive, young concert-goers if Vylan had chanted, “Death, death, to the Jews!”
Had he done so, he would’ve been booed off the stage. His fan base would’ve evaporated overnight rather than growing exponentially.
That’s why all of the hyperbolic response to Vylan’s “death to the IDF” chant is so very disingenuous, cynical, and manipulative. In a word: dishonest.
Contrary to what the defenders of this century’s holocaust will tell you, this wasn’t an expression of “anti-Semitism.” Vylan wasn’t calling for the death of Jewish people — or even the Israeli people.
He was calling for the demise of the murderous, white-supremacist institution that’s spent the last ~21 months committing atrocities beyond measure — an institution which history will surely mention in the same breath as the Gestapo, the SS, U.S. neocons of the last 35 years, the Khmer Rouge, et al.
The lesson: Don’t let genocide’s perpetrators and defenders define “hate speech” for you.
They’re just trying to silence dissent so they can continue slaughtering women and children with impunity, firing live rounds into throngs of starving people lining up at aid stations, targeting medical workers and journalists, and censoring everyone who resists.
“Intifada” means “resistance” — nothing more. Resistance, in the present case, to historic atrocities.
In another 5-10 years, most Westerners who today condemn the global intifada and artists like Vylan will be pretending they were part of the resistance to genocide, all along.
Because that, my friends, is what hypocrites do.
If I were on twitterex, I’d be sharing this video of the chant everywhere.
So why aren’t you?
Because whoever owns it already has enough wealth and power and influence over governments.
Everytime someone uses these platforms they’re contributing to the hegemon of the uber-rich.
“Death to the IDF” is about as offensive to me as “Death to America.” NOT!
When the State tells you what you can and can not think, then that is neither democracy nor freedom.
Britain is a Monarchy. It claims to be a constitutional monarchy, but never actually did the constitution part.
Britain has always been a state where the upper class rules, with charades of elections to pretend that ordinary people might get a say in His Majesty’s Government. We are all Palestine.
The human mental instrument is designed (evolved/adapted) to function with inputs from an environment utterly unconcerned with human mental processes and needs, unbidden inputs of absolute Reality. This mental instrument clearly flounders in a world in which the flows of information are intentional, formulated to a purpose: There should be no surprise that we are controlled by the information that we receive. The real surprise is that there are those who still have the degree of social, political and moral clarity that they do.
“flounders” appears to be the correct word, as the human brain somehow forgets that this information flow always has an off switch.
Our engagement with these intentional information flows designed to manipulate us into hating the oppressed and loving the powerful and their Venice weddings is always completely voluntary. We have to access their feeds. We have to turn on a TV and tune to their channels. We have to access their websites. A blank screen does not talk to us. At some point, the human brain which is floundering under all this intentionally manipulative information had to take a conscious action to access it. If the human brain had simply awoken in the morning, gotten something to eat, then went and sat under a tree somewhere and watched the birds and animals, then none of this intentionally manipulative information flow reaches them.
Yes, we can be controlled by the information we receive, but we always still control which information we do receive. Use good judgement.
“If you want to get to heaven
Over on the other shore
Stay out of the way of the long-tongue liar
Oh good shepherd
Feed my sheep”
–“Good Shepherd” by Jefferson Airplane, 1969 (Jorma Kaukonen, based on traditional hymm).