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Spectator
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Glastonbury has become a sinister festival of anti-Semitism
They're chanting for the death of Jews at Glastonbury. Yesterday a swaying mob of faux-virtuous poseurs blithely howled for 'Death, death to the IDF'. They'll say they were being political. 'It was an anti-war cry, not an anti-Jew cry', they'll insist today, as the hangover lifts and the horror of their noisy clamour for the death of those they hate finally dawns on them. But such thin excuses won't wash, not this time. That's what Glastonbury felt like yesterday: a woke Nuremberg rally It was the punk rap act Bob Vylan that appeared to whip the crowd into a frenzy of Israelophobia. The lead singer first got them chanting 'Free, free Palestine', the mandatory holler of every bourgeois youth who's determined to prove his virtue to his peers. Then he upped the ante. 'Death, death to the IDF', he barked, and the audience went with it. Like a Pavlovian pack, they mimicked the rocker on stage and shrieked for the violent demise of the army of the Jewish nation. Let's speak frankly – our moral crisis is too pressing for pussy-footing. 'Death to the IDF' means the death of Jews. First, because the soldiers of the IDF are predominantly Jewish. But more importantly because this is the force tasked with defending the Jewish homeland from the armies of anti-Semites that surround it. The IDF is the only thing standing between the Jewish State and its genocidal obliteration by the apocalyptic bigots on its borders. The death of the IDF would be the death of the world's only Jewish nation. Untold numbers of Jews would perish in the event of this thing dreamt of by the preening middle classes of Glastonbury. 'We didn't think of that', some will say today, as shame intrudes into the sick joy they derived from praying for the death of other human beings. Well, to borrow a slogan beloved of you people: 'Educate yourselves.' The seriousness of what happened at Glastonbury cannot be overstated. I'm struggling to think of any other recent event in the UK where a mob has called for the death of human beings. Where a crowd has agitated with macabre elation for people to die. I guess there were those small, mad gatherings of Islamists a few years ago, where some held up placards saying: 'Behead those who insult Islam.' But Glasto's roar for the death of the young Jewish men and women of the IDF felt worse. For here we had privileged youths issuing mantras of death. Here we had a festival that's meant to be about peace and love ringing out with a din-like demand for the destruction of human life. Imagine how Glasto's Jewish attendees will have felt. Or Jewish viewers at home – the BBC live-broadcasted the sick death chant. A majority of British Jews identify with the Jewish nation, and yet here were their Gentile compatriots openly fantasising about the death of that nation's youthful protectors. What a sickening sight. The question that hangs darkly over Glastonbury's death dreaming is this: why the IDF? Why not 'Death to the People's Liberaton Army', which visits such horrors on the Uyghur people? Or 'Death to the Rapid Support Forces', the psycho militia that has caused tens of thousands of deaths in Sudan over the past two years? Or, indeed, 'Death to Hamas', that reactionary, racist army that started the war in Gaza with its fascistic pogrom of 7 October 2023? A pogrom that involved mass rape and murder at a music festival not unlike Glastonbury. We all know why. It's because hating the Jewish State is all the rage among the activist classes. Singling out the Jewish nation as the most bloodthirsty nation is what passes for 'politics' on today's left. They damn this tiny country as the greatest menace to humanity, as a Nazi-like entity, as a nation so swimming in sin and blood that it deserves to be erased, 'from the river to the sea'. Tell me there isn't bigotry here. Tell me it doesn't echo the older, darker damnation of the Jews themselves as a bloodlusting people, the poison in the well of humanity. For me, that's what Glastonbury felt like yesterday: a woke Nuremberg rally. With their gleeful cry for the death of Israeli soldiers, for the destruction of the army that defends the Jewish homeland, these people sounded more like the moral heirs of Oswald Mosley than Sylvia Pankhurst. It was a like a gathering of Guardianista versions of Unity Mitford essentially saying, 'F**k the Jewish nation'. Glastonbury has apologised. The festival said it was 'appalled' by what unfolded. But there's no doubt that this felt like a turning point. The mania of Israel-hate stood exposed before the world. The true nature of the bourgeois cult of Palestinianism, with its virulent hostility not only to Israel but to the West itself, was clear for all to see. We glimpsed, briefly, the threat that the delirium of Israelophobia poses to Jewish security, to the values of our own civilisation, and to all that is decent. These people have had the stage for too long – it's time for the good among us to stand up.
Spectator
02-06-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
Ireland has been consumed by hatred of Israel
A new religion blights the Republic of Ireland. Catholicism has been supplanted by a far more cultish creed. Its doctrines are declared with great fervour, its icons scar every town and village. You will struggle to find one person who has not converted to this strange and all-consuming faith. Its name? Israelophobia. I knew Ireland was hostile to Israel but I had no idea how bad things had got. It's suffocating. Wherever you go, whether city or bog, you'll see it and hear it – that swirling animus for the Jewish State. The political class speaks of little else. The media are feverishly obsessed. From every political party, every TV set, every soapbox, the cry goes out: Israel is evil! It's inescapable. It's all over Dublin, of course, long a hotbed of leftish activism. You won't walk five metres there without seeing a youth wearing a keffiyeh and a look of smug self-satisfaction.
Telegraph
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Left-wing haters cannot accept that Israel is winning
As Israel's sons say goodbye to their families and grind into action in Gaza once more, so depleted is Hamas that there is a chance that the Jewish state might actually win this time. Cue howls of outrage from the Left, which long ago threw in its lot with the jihadis. While the tanks roll into Khan Younis, the Lineker classes and their faceless digital denizens mobilise to do their level best to block an Israeli victory. True, Eurovision was a glimmer in the dark. To see Yuval Raphael, an amateur singer who had survived the Hamas massacre by playing dead under a pile of bodies for eight hours, come second in the competition and first in the public vote, was a moving sign that all may not be lost. Of course, public voters self-selected and could cast up to 20 ballots, favouring motivated campaigners. Nonetheless, this triumph over a frenzy of hatred felt like an uprising against the Israelophobia of the elites. In the scheme of things, however, this was but a blip in a graph of hostility towards the Jewish state that reached unprecedented highs some time ago. In an interview on Sunday, British surgeon Tom Potokar, who is working in Gaza, compared Israel's campaign to the killing fields of Cambodia, when more than a million people were systematically murdered by the Khmer Rouge in the late Seventies. So depraved were those massacres that troops would drink from human gallbladders. These activists have jumped the shark. To compare Pol Pot's genocide to the just campaign in Gaza, where great efforts have been made to protect civilian lives, which have been claimed only unintentionally – as is tragically the case in every war ever fought by a democracy – could only be described as propaganda. Simply the question of numbers speaks volumes. Let us, for a moment, take the jihadis of Hamas at their word when they tell us that 62,000 people have been killed, the majority of whom were, by some sinister Jewish magic, women and children. How does that compare to the million who perished under Pol Pot? The Cambodian communists were analogue génocidaires, carrying out their butchery with hammers, knives and axes. By contrast, if Israel's powerful army really did intend to wipe out two million Gazans, thereby saving its young men the trouble of going to war, it could have done so from the air in a matter of hours. Entirely predictably, Hollywood has joined the latest global effort to block an Israeli victory. The actors Joaquin Pheonix, Pedro Pascal and Riz Ahmed joined director Guillermo del Toro and 370 other fools of showbusiness in signing a letter condemning the film industry's supposed 'silence' about the 'genocide' in Gaza. With all the flair of a GCSE creative writing student, they wrote: 'Let us reject the propaganda that constantly colonises our imaginations and makes us lose our sense of humanity.' It's easy to mock these people, but they have millions of impressionable followers online. Add to this the bot army, which in recent days has been out in force on social media, and Israel is facing a multi-dimensional influence operation. My timeline has become saturated yet again with gratuitous footage of dead children, outrageous claims of 'genocide' and naked antisemitism. I don't know about yours. What these invertebrates really can't stomach is that Benjamin Netanyahu's goal of 'total victory' is near at hand. Last week, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Mohammed Sinwar, perished in a surgical airstrike on the tunnels beneath the European Hospital in Khan Younis. In Britain, this barely made the news. After all, the younger Sinwar, who had survived just seven months in office, was following a succession of more famous jihadi leaders to the grave, from the elusive Mohammed Deif and the showboating Ismail Haniyeh to his notorious older brother Yahya. The demise of Sinwar junior, along with the suspected deaths of lieutenants Abu Obeida and Muhammad Shabana, brought the number of recently assassinated Hamas chiefs to 37. This against a total of 54 targets, with eight in Qatar and Turkey. The latest departed leader was reputed to hold an ultra-hard line on hostage negotiations. Now, thankfully, there is marginally more chance of their release. While Israeli forces issue evacuation orders east of Khan Younis ahead of an 'unprecedented attack', Hamas has been back at the negotiating table in Qatar. In short, coupled with the liquidation of Hezbollah's command structure and weapons stockpiles last year, and the destruction of Iran's air defences, Israel is in a stronger position than it has been since 1967. Ironically, the shark-jumping hysteria from the Left is in some ways assisting an Israeli victory, not hindering it. The crescendo of international opprobrium has been at fever pitch literally for years, yet Israel finds itself in a position of almost unprecedented military dominance. The lesson in Jerusalem is clear: They threw everything at us, and this is the result? Bring it on. That, combined with Donald Trump's flickering green light, may just have emboldened Israel to take the steps needed to win the war. By which, of course, I mean the physical war, which in the final analysis is the one that matters. As the legendary Golda Meir once remarked: 'If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we'd rather be alive and have the bad image.'
