As hundreds of thousands of bucket-hat-wearing do-gooders descended on a field in Somerset, England last week for a long weekend of sunshine, small-batch booze and not showering, something more sinister was brewing. Attendees at Glastonbury, the UK’s largest and most famous music festival, donned their Chinese-made keffiyehs, picked up their Palestine flags fresh from Amazon and began chanting all the usual anti-Israel slogans.
In the first instance, it was Kneecap, an Irish hip-hop trio of IRA cosplayers pushing middle age, who led the crowd in a cheer of “free, free Palestine.” During their set, screens read: “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people, aided by the UK government.” They lectured their audience that “there’s no fucking hiding it, Israel are war criminals.”
Though insufferable, this rhetoric was markedly toned down from the group’s usual ravings. One of Kneecap’s members, who goes by the stage name Mo Chara, was recently charged with a terror offence. During a gig last year, he allegedly displayed the flag of Hezbollah, a bloodthirsty band of antisemitic Islamists and a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK. In a video from the concert, one of Kneecap’s members also appears to shout “up Hamas, up Hezbollah!”
The trio were also under investigation for a separate incident from 2023, when during a concert they shouted that “the only good Tory is a dead Tory” and called on the crowd to “kill your local MP.” The Metropolitan Police decided last week, however, that they would not prosecute. They apparently reserve that type of action for housewives like Lucy Connolly.
As a result of all this controversy, UK prime minister Keir Starmer called on Glasto organisers to strike Kneecap off the setlist. They refused—as they were well within their rights to do. If people want to pay almost £400 to sleep in a tent and watch a man wearing a tricolour tea cosy prance about on stage, then so be it. But I reserve the right to mock them mercilessly for it.
The BBC, on the other hand, took the decision not to broadcast Kneecap’s set live, as it normally does for other artists, due to concerns over breaking impartiality rules. It did, however, make the performance live on the BBC iPlayer streaming service, which is, let’s not forget, paid for with taxpayer money.
More concerning, though, was the display put on by ‘Bob Vylan’, a punk duo I can only assume materialised onto the Earth a few days ago, because I’d never heard of them before. They came on stage after Kneecap, and led the crowd in the standard “free, free Palestine” chant. “Alright,” said Vylan frontman Pascal Robinson-Foster, “but have you heard this one, though?” He then launched into a cry of “death, death to the IDF,” which festival-goers happily repeated back to him. Pleased with himself, Robinson-Foster rounded it off by proclaiming that “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be, will be, inshallah, will be free.” This phrase, though beloved by Western pro-Palestine luvvies, is an explicit call to erase Israel off the map altogether. Bob Vylan’s entire performance was live-streamed on BBC iPlayer, but has since been taken down.
None of this is to say that Kneecap or Bob Vylan should be arrested or charged with any crime for these chants (although Avon and Somerset police are currently investigating Vylan for their set, and Robinson-Foster could be barred from entering the US). As Laurie Wastell wrote in the Spectator yesterday, there was no real case here for incitement to violence: “Did Glasto’s middle-class crusties proceed to put down the natural wine, pack up their tents and carry out a pogrom?” Obviously, the answer is no. Vylan, Kneecap, and the woke activists who hang on to their every word are in no danger of committing actual acts of violence. Besides, attempting to shut them up will only turn them into the martyrs they so crave to become.
Nor should any of us be surprised by the fact that this happened at Glastonbury. This is, after all, the same festival that hosted a talk by an activist from Palestine Action, a group the UK government is currently in the process of proscribing as a terrorist organisation. It featured the likes of Bob Vlyan who, aside from their anti-Israel comments, performed in front of a screen bearing the words “This country was built on the backs of immigrants” and sang lyrics such as “Heard you want your country back—ha! Shut the fuck up.” This year, Glasto also hosted a panel titled ‘Feminism in the age of the manosphere’ and encouraged festivalgoers to attend “healing” yoga sessions. It is now less a celebration of counterculture and more a destination for middle-class mummies on their annual weekend away from north London and for students who are terrified of making phone calls, but happy to spend three days off their faces on ketamine.
These people may just be cosplaying as revolutionaries, but this does point to how normalised anti-Israel hatred has become in the UK. This is not some fringe event, but one of the biggest fixtures in the British musical calendar. Slogans calling for what is essentially the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state have gone well and truly mainstream.
The lyrics for this have been written well in advance. In the more than two years following Hamas’s October 7th pogrom in 2023, virulent Israelophobia has become the preserve of progressive, metropolitan types. The same people who proudly display watermelon stickers on their Macbooks or boycott Starbucks’s oat milk flat whites are clapping like seals when Kneecap shout “up Hamas” or when Bob Vylan call for “death to the IDF.”
The BBC in particular has been more than happy to advance this agenda. The state broadcaster has found itself embroiled in scandal after scandal, reporting propaganda from Hamas and Hamas-linked organisations almost uncritically. Just this month, the BBC was caught repeating claims that Israeli forces had attacked and killed Gazans waiting at an aid station. Its main source came from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, as well as local Palestinian journalists who are under pressure from the terrorist group to self-censor.
Worse still, the BBC even had to pull its own documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, earlier this year after it emerged that its child narrator was the son of a Hamas official. The programme centred on a 13-year-old boy called Abdullah, whose father was later revealed to be Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture. Other key characters featured in the doc included one child who was used in anti-Israel propaganda, and another whose father was a captain in Hamas’s police force.
No wonder the BBC was reluctant to pull the plug on Bob Vylan’s anti-Israel screed at the weekend. The romanticisation of terror and the demonisation of Israel we saw at Glasto this year is the culmination of a years-long drift in Britain’s institutions towards a shallow, performative kind of ‘pro-Palestine’ radicalism. The likes of Bob Vylan and Kneecap may not have said anything explicitly antisemitic, but they did display an obvious preference for the side in the war that is actively trying to exterminate Jews in the Middle East. The fact that this has become not just normal, but also expected at events like Glastonbury speaks volumes. When chants calling for Israel’s destruction are met with cheers rather than condemnation, it’s clear that Israelophobia has been absorbed into the mainstream.
A Rally for The Anti-Israel Mob
To the backdrop of a Palestinian flag, Bobby Vylan of British duo Bob Vylan performs at the Glastonbury festival in England on June 28, 2025.
Oli Scarff / AFP
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As hundreds of thousands of bucket-hat-wearing do-gooders descended on a field in Somerset, England last week for a long weekend of sunshine, small-batch booze and not showering, something more sinister was brewing. Attendees at Glastonbury, the UK’s largest and most famous music festival, donned their Chinese-made keffiyehs, picked up their Palestine flags fresh from Amazon and began chanting all the usual anti-Israel slogans.
In the first instance, it was Kneecap, an Irish hip-hop trio of IRA cosplayers pushing middle age, who led the crowd in a cheer of “free, free Palestine.” During their set, screens read: “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people, aided by the UK government.” They lectured their audience that “there’s no fucking hiding it, Israel are war criminals.”
Though insufferable, this rhetoric was markedly toned down from the group’s usual ravings. One of Kneecap’s members, who goes by the stage name Mo Chara, was recently charged with a terror offence. During a gig last year, he allegedly displayed the flag of Hezbollah, a bloodthirsty band of antisemitic Islamists and a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK. In a video from the concert, one of Kneecap’s members also appears to shout “up Hamas, up Hezbollah!”
The trio were also under investigation for a separate incident from 2023, when during a concert they shouted that “the only good Tory is a dead Tory” and called on the crowd to “kill your local MP.” The Metropolitan Police decided last week, however, that they would not prosecute. They apparently reserve that type of action for housewives like Lucy Connolly.
As a result of all this controversy, UK prime minister Keir Starmer called on Glasto organisers to strike Kneecap off the setlist. They refused—as they were well within their rights to do. If people want to pay almost £400 to sleep in a tent and watch a man wearing a tricolour tea cosy prance about on stage, then so be it. But I reserve the right to mock them mercilessly for it.
The BBC, on the other hand, took the decision not to broadcast Kneecap’s set live, as it normally does for other artists, due to concerns over breaking impartiality rules. It did, however, make the performance live on the BBC iPlayer streaming service, which is, let’s not forget, paid for with taxpayer money.
More concerning, though, was the display put on by ‘Bob Vylan’, a punk duo I can only assume materialised onto the Earth a few days ago, because I’d never heard of them before. They came on stage after Kneecap, and led the crowd in the standard “free, free Palestine” chant. “Alright,” said Vylan frontman Pascal Robinson-Foster, “but have you heard this one, though?” He then launched into a cry of “death, death to the IDF,” which festival-goers happily repeated back to him. Pleased with himself, Robinson-Foster rounded it off by proclaiming that “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be, will be, inshallah, will be free.” This phrase, though beloved by Western pro-Palestine luvvies, is an explicit call to erase Israel off the map altogether. Bob Vylan’s entire performance was live-streamed on BBC iPlayer, but has since been taken down.
None of this is to say that Kneecap or Bob Vylan should be arrested or charged with any crime for these chants (although Avon and Somerset police are currently investigating Vylan for their set, and Robinson-Foster could be barred from entering the US). As Laurie Wastell wrote in the Spectator yesterday, there was no real case here for incitement to violence: “Did Glasto’s middle-class crusties proceed to put down the natural wine, pack up their tents and carry out a pogrom?” Obviously, the answer is no. Vylan, Kneecap, and the woke activists who hang on to their every word are in no danger of committing actual acts of violence. Besides, attempting to shut them up will only turn them into the martyrs they so crave to become.
Nor should any of us be surprised by the fact that this happened at Glastonbury. This is, after all, the same festival that hosted a talk by an activist from Palestine Action, a group the UK government is currently in the process of proscribing as a terrorist organisation. It featured the likes of Bob Vlyan who, aside from their anti-Israel comments, performed in front of a screen bearing the words “This country was built on the backs of immigrants” and sang lyrics such as “Heard you want your country back—ha! Shut the fuck up.” This year, Glasto also hosted a panel titled ‘Feminism in the age of the manosphere’ and encouraged festivalgoers to attend “healing” yoga sessions. It is now less a celebration of counterculture and more a destination for middle-class mummies on their annual weekend away from north London and for students who are terrified of making phone calls, but happy to spend three days off their faces on ketamine.
These people may just be cosplaying as revolutionaries, but this does point to how normalised anti-Israel hatred has become in the UK. This is not some fringe event, but one of the biggest fixtures in the British musical calendar. Slogans calling for what is essentially the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state have gone well and truly mainstream.
The lyrics for this have been written well in advance. In the more than two years following Hamas’s October 7th pogrom in 2023, virulent Israelophobia has become the preserve of progressive, metropolitan types. The same people who proudly display watermelon stickers on their Macbooks or boycott Starbucks’s oat milk flat whites are clapping like seals when Kneecap shout “up Hamas” or when Bob Vylan call for “death to the IDF.”
The BBC in particular has been more than happy to advance this agenda. The state broadcaster has found itself embroiled in scandal after scandal, reporting propaganda from Hamas and Hamas-linked organisations almost uncritically. Just this month, the BBC was caught repeating claims that Israeli forces had attacked and killed Gazans waiting at an aid station. Its main source came from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, as well as local Palestinian journalists who are under pressure from the terrorist group to self-censor.
Worse still, the BBC even had to pull its own documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, earlier this year after it emerged that its child narrator was the son of a Hamas official. The programme centred on a 13-year-old boy called Abdullah, whose father was later revealed to be Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture. Other key characters featured in the doc included one child who was used in anti-Israel propaganda, and another whose father was a captain in Hamas’s police force.
No wonder the BBC was reluctant to pull the plug on Bob Vylan’s anti-Israel screed at the weekend. The romanticisation of terror and the demonisation of Israel we saw at Glasto this year is the culmination of a years-long drift in Britain’s institutions towards a shallow, performative kind of ‘pro-Palestine’ radicalism. The likes of Bob Vylan and Kneecap may not have said anything explicitly antisemitic, but they did display an obvious preference for the side in the war that is actively trying to exterminate Jews in the Middle East. The fact that this has become not just normal, but also expected at events like Glastonbury speaks volumes. When chants calling for Israel’s destruction are met with cheers rather than condemnation, it’s clear that Israelophobia has been absorbed into the mainstream.
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