The sight of a Glastonbury crowd roaring along to chants of “free, free Palestine” and “death, death to the IDF” should chill anyone with a shred of decency.
It wasn’t an underground gig in a squat in Camden—it was one of the world’s most celebrated music festivals, broadcast live by the BBC, our national broadcaster, to millions. The band in question, the punk-rap duo Bob Vylan, used their platform not for art, not even for protest in the classical sense, but for a tirade of unfiltered hate.
And what was the response? Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it “appalling hate speech”. Glastonbury’s organisers said they were “appalled”. The BBC said the comments were “deeply offensive” and promptly removed the performance from iPlayer. So far, so predictable. But none of this absolves the deep hypocrisy at the heart of Labour’s reaction—and the wider media-political complex that allows this bile to thrive so long as it aligns with the fashionable ideologies of the day.
Because here’s the question no one seems to be asking: how would Sir Keir have reacted if the script were flipped?
Imagine, for a moment, an artist stood on that stage and chanted, “Death to Hamas.” Imagine the crowd erupting in cheers to a cry of “Shame on Gaza’s terrorists.” Imagine if they had performed a song slamming pro-Palestinian protestors as apologists for murder or marched out with an Israeli flag on their back. Would the BBC have aired it? Would Glastonbury have booked them? And would Starmer’s condemnation have been as swift, or would he have muttered something about “freedom of expression” before pivoting to “concerns about rising Islamophobia”?
We all know the answer.
The truth is that hatred against Israel has become the last socially acceptable form of bigotry in Britain’s elite circles. It masquerades as “anti-Zionism” or “solidarity with the oppressed”, but scratch beneath the surface and you find calls for the destruction of a sovereign nation and the death of its citizens. In this case, soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces—many of them teenagers, conscripts, Jews, Druze, Arabs—became targets of a death chant at a festival that once prided itself on “peace and love”.
And yet the outrage feels hollow because it is always selective. When anti-Israel bile spews from a stage or a student union, it is tolerated, even quietly encouraged. Campus radicals, union bosses, and even members of Starmer’s own Labour Party have long trafficked in the same slogans and sentiments as those shouted by Bob Vylan. But they package it in the academic gloss of “decolonial struggle” or the rainbow-washed radicalism of protest culture.
Starmer, we are told, has “cleaned up” Labour’s antisemitism problem. He expelled Jeremy Corbyn, wore a kippah in synagogues, and proclaimed his unwavering support for British Jews. But here lies the rub: Starmer is content to denounce hate when it comes in punk lyrics, but he lacks the spine to confront the root cause—his own party’s indulgence in anti-Israel rhetoric for decades. He wants to police language from a distance, while refusing to confront the fact that this poison flows directly from the ideological well Labour has been drinking from.
And what of the BBC? Their spokesperson called the lyrics “deeply offensive”. But they aired them. They didn’t cut away. They didn’t issue an immediate apology. Only after the backlash did they remove the performance and begin the hand-wringing. One wonders: if Bob Vylan had called for the death of any other nation’s armed forces—say, the French Foreign Legion, the Indian Army, or indeed Hamas—would it have gone out live without a hitch?
The problem is not just that the BBC aired it. It’s that our cultural class is so saturated in performative “activism” that no one thought to object until after the fact. From producers to festival bookers, from stage managers to crowd-goers, how many nodded along with the chants, thinking themselves brave rebels rather than hate-enablers?
We’ve now reached a point where calls for the annihilation of Jews—because that is what “death to the IDF” ultimately amounts to—can be dressed up as edgy political art. It doesn’t matter that Israel is a democracy, that it is under attack by Islamist terrorists, that its soldiers are defending civilians from rockets and abductions. All that matters to this crowd is that Israel is framed as the “colonial oppressor”, and therefore anything said against it—no matter how vile—is fair game.
Starmer knows this, and it terrifies him. He knows that the hard Left still simmers with anti-Israel sentiment. He knows that condemning Bob Vylan too forcefully risks alienating the younger, activist base Labour has been courting with climate slogans and “social justice” soundbites. And he knows that if he applies the same standard of hate speech across the board—if he actually draws red lines—he will have to start purging not just punk bands, but half the political class that supported Corbyn and still seethes with resentment at Israel’s existence.
So instead we get a sanitized condemnation, a bureaucratic wag of the finger, and a quiet hope that the public will move on before anyone asks the difficult questions.
But we must ask them. We must ask why British Jews are meant to be grateful for lukewarm support while threats to their brothers and sisters in Israel are cheered from festival fields. We must ask why Israel, and Israel alone, is the acceptable punching bag of a generation that claims to care about human rights. And we must ask: what does it say about our culture that if an act had dared to criticise Palestinian militants—if someone had shouted “death to Hamas”—they would likely be cancelled, deplatformed, and denounced as Islamophobic within hours?
Glastonbury may have washed its hands. The BBC may have pulled the footage. And Starmer may have issued his carefully calibrated soundbite. But none of it answers the fundamental problem: in modern Britain, some forms of hate are tolerated—so long as they punch in the right direction.
Until that changes, no amount of performative outrage can disguise the fact that we are nurturing a new form of extremism under the guise of progressive art. And Starmer, for all his condemnation, is doing nothing to stop it.
