Middle class youngsters chanting for death shows how sick Britain now is

Telegraph

17 hours ago

The spectacle of massed crowds calling for the blood of Jews is more associated with Islamist dictatorships than our own democracies. On October 7, however, something foul awoke in the West. Less than two years later, we find thousands of white youngsters from the leafy suburbs of Middle England chanting 'death, death to the IDF' at the Glastonbury Festival of a Saturday afternoon.
Would that be the same IDF that delivered us from the spectre of a nuclear-armed Iran with remarkably few civilian casualties? Which rescued us from the regime described by the head of MI5 as 'the state actor which most frequently crosses into terrorism' on our shores? Why, yes. Yes it would.
Your average Glasto fan, it seems, would have no objection if Tehran's thugs brought the 'intifada' over here, perhaps with a nuclear bomb on London, so long as they brought death to Israel first. Such is the way with brainless trends, even when the fashion is for bloodlust.
What Jewish festival-goers must have felt amidst that display of depravity is enough to make you ashamed of our country. Don't forget, this gory chapter began with a massacre of revellers at the Nova music festival; in a sane world, you'd have expected Glastonbury to fly the Israeli flag in solidarity and chant for the demise of Hamas.
The cleanness of the Iran campaign shows how the IDF can operate when its enemy does not push civilians into harm's way for the benefit of the international media. Clearly, Israel is not trying to kill the innocent. Has that thought occurred to any of the Glasto cultists? Of course not. As transparent as it may be, Hamas propaganda is a roaring success when people get their kicks out of believing it.
Depressingly, this has become the new normal. There literally is no evil so dark that it cannot find enthusiastic support on the Western Left, so long as that evil first wishes death upon the Jews. Astonishingly, that principle holds even if the evil happens to wish death upon us second. It's true what they say: antisemitism is a sickness and at bottom it is a hatred of ourselves.
Whether Bob Vylan, the dreadlocked rapper who led Saturday's version of Orwell's Two Minutes Hate, was breaking the law is beside the point. Legislation is limited when the culture moves beyond it. Even the BBC's attempts at decorum – they had refused to broadcast the performance by Kneecap, the Irish band which has supported Hamas and Hezbollah and demanded that people kill their local Tory MPs – collapsed when put to the test. Shamefully, the 'death to the IDF' chant was beamed out by our national broadcaster into millions of homes.
On Thursday, Sir Michael Eavis, the founder of Glastonbury, defiantly insisted that people should 'go somewhere else' if they did not like the politics of his festival. By Saturday, we saw what those politics meant: a carnival of bloodthirsty radicalism that would have been unrecognisable in the Britain of our parents.
Jeremy Corbyn may have epitomised the vacuity of the Gaza Left by praising a banner saying 'build bridges not walls' that was literally pinned to a wall, but the joke is wearing thin. In May, a Palestine activist murdered two Israeli diplomats in Washington DC. Last week, Palestine activists sabotaged RAF aircraft vital to our national security. Yet still the simpering BBC fawns over the Eavis clan.
For years, sensible people have scratched their heads at how the Left can have come to support jihadis. At the Glastonbury festival of narcissism, however, it has become difficult to tell them apart.