The penultimate scandal of the Glastonbury Festival, the largest outdoor musical event in the world and a whole cultural and countercultural phenomenon with half a century of life, contains all the ingredients of a purely British entrap Hypocrisy The Avon and Somerset Police Department, whose jurisdiction corresponds to everything that may happen at that party, has finally opened an investigation to the Punk-Rap Bob Vylan group, for shouting on Saturday afternoon from the stage “death, death to the IDF” (“Death, Death to the Defense Forces of Israel”, the official name of the army of that country), and the Irish rap group Kneecap, who acted at the same time in the same stage and usually displayed Palestinian flags and slogans in favor of the Hezbollah terrorist group.
The police authorities are reviewing the video of both actions, and at the moment they frame the investigation in an apparent crime of public offense. They do not rule out, as the investigation progresses, that the object of their investigations becomes a possible crime of hate.
The BBC did not broadcast in any of its conventional chains the Bob Vylan concert, but offered streaming live on its BBC Iplayer digital platform. In the case of the Kneecap concert, not even that, although he later incorporated a great fragment without editing the performance in his daily summary of the best moments of the festival, which he publishes on the platform. The Israel Embassy in the United Kingdom did not take long to sound the alarm in a statement in which he expressed his “deep disturbance for the incendiary rhetoric of hate” that, according to her, had expressed himself on stage, with slogans that “advocate for the dismantling of the state of Israel.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose almost unconditional support to Israel and his moderate condemnation of what happened in Gaza has irritated a large part of the Labor Party, was among the first to condemn what happened in Glastonbury and demand explanations to the BBC. “There is no excuse for such a scandalous hate speech.
The BBC made its own act of contrition, and apologized for not having immediately cut the broadcast. And even the organizers of Glastonbury expressed their dismay: “As a festival, we are against any form of war or terrorism. We will always believe and campaign for hope, unity, peace and love,” Emily Eavis, one of the promoters of the event and notorious British feminist.
Little margin of surprise
The Bob Vylan Group, whose two components prefer to keep their real names under the anonymity, are originally from London, and have been interpreting an explosive mixture of punk and rap with aggressively politicians and provocative actions on stage.
Kneecap, the Belfast group, the capital of Northern Ireland, with republican affinities, has long been dedicated to glorifying the anger or Hezbollah. Its main singer, Liam Iog or Hannaidh, whose artistic name is Mo Chara (my friend, in Irish), appeared on June 18 before a British court for having deployed a Hezbollah flag at the London stadium in O2, during a concert. Currently on bail, he presented himself on Saturday in Glastonbury as “a free man” and encouraged those present to chant the cry “Fuck Keir Starmer”(Keir Starmer is fucking).
With all these background, the reaction of the organizers of the Festival or the BBC has ended up resembling that of capital Louis Renault, the film’s prefect of the film Casablanca that he is scandalized that there are bets and clandestine game in a place and then claims his profits. The proliferation of Palestinian flags in Glastonbury gave an approximate idea of what communication between the public and the stage was going to be.
The response of everything that happened by the Bob Vylan Group has been a video statement in which they say that “claiming the end of innocent’s killing will never be something bad. To Israel’s civilians we ask that they do not understand this anger as something directed against them, and that they do not allow their government that convinces them that a song against the army is a song against the people (of Israel)”.
The group’s performance was witnessed live by a few tens of thousands of spectators, along with those who could join in the streaming of the BBC. His notoriety, in the last hours, has increased considerably.
In 1976, journalist Bill Grundy interviewed the Sex Pistols in the BBC, which did not stop releasing obscenities throughout the program. It is estimated that they saw them between five and six million viewers. Public radiotelevision decided to prohibit the issuance of issues such as Anarchy in the UK o God Save the Queen. The British punk band became a universal and countercultural phenomenon that changed the musical trend of many other countries.