01-05-2025
Suzanne Harrington: I was at THAT Kneecap gig in London — it was not pro-violence
Are Kneecap terrorists now? Because overnight, that's what the UK establishment has told us to think. Or that they are terrorist adjacent. Ha ha ha, what hilarious nonsense, you might think instead. Except it's not funny.
Anyone who has listened to the trio will know that they use hyperbole and humour. They like a theatrical flourish, from comedy balaclavas to showing up to events in ex-RUC vehicles. They use mockery: your sniffer dogs are shite. Get your Brits out. Their lyrics are funny and surreal – like imagining Arlene Foster on ecstasy.
They are fantastically irreverent, working on the David Sedaris idea that everything is funny eventually. Harnessing all that intergenerational trauma, reclaiming it, channelling it into blistering performance, half of it in Irish. And amid the deafening silence from the rest of the world, they remain relentlessly and vociferously critical of the genocide in Palestine.
For their trouble, the UK establishment wants them deplatformed.
You might disagree with Kneecap calling out the mass slaughter of Palestinians – although if you are a sentient human being, that's unlikely – yet in a democracy, you'd still defend their right to say it. Wouldn't you? But ever since Coachella ('Fuck Israel. Free Palestine') there's been a backlash.
I don't know the details of their supposed calls to kill an MP – nobody does - but I highly doubt it was anything other than a comedic rant taken out of context. We have seen no evidence of anything in this regard. Nothing, apart from all the sudden tsunami of headlines overusing the word 'alleged'. Kneecap are not advocates of violence - unlike the UK and US establishment busy arming Israel, they repeatedly state that they are radically pro-peace.
Suzanne Harrington: Anyone who has listened to the trio will know that they use hyperbole and humour.
I was at that gig in London last November where they were alleged to have shouted support for terrorist organisations. If I found myself at a gig where the performers were shouting pro-terrorist slogans, or anything pro-violence, I'd be out the door immediately. Horrified. On October 7 2023, Hamas murdered the very demographic that attend gigs – civilian music lovers.
Now Kneecap have Mrs Ozzy 'Prince of bat-eating Darkness' Osbourne calling on Trump to have them banned from entering the US, and a Tory MP calling on Michael Eavis to have them taken off the Glastonbury line up. The Tories already hate them, because Kneecap sued them and won.
As British police scrape through performance footage, UK politicians are pressuring venues to cancel sold-out Kneecap events. Some are already capitulating, terrified of being seen to support – what? Terrorism?
This is upside-down, inside-out, Orwellian - three young Irish musicians being censured and censored for criticising the murder of tens of thousands of children.
Their words are being reviled, while mass slaughter is not. Forty musicians from Paul Weller to Fontaines DC, Christy Moore to Jarvis Cocker to The Pogues, have formally shown support, criticised the UK establishment for 'strategically concocting moral outrage' against Kneecap while ignoring the genocide in Gaza.
So, who's next to be Kneecapped – Louis Theroux? How long before Settlers, his documentary about West Bank colonisers, is taken down? Before accusations of anti-Semitism are tossed about? This strategy – calling any criticism of the Israeli government 'anti-Semitic' - worked a treat on deplatforming Jeremy Corbyn. Now they're doing it to Kneecap. Who's next?
