The woke left loves a good censoring. They’re thrilled when feminists are blacklisted for saying people with cocks aren’t women. They gleefully No Platform far-right tub-thumpers. They sprint for the fainting couch if the BBC gives airtime to a ‘climate denier’. Yet now, suddenly, they’ve come out for free speech. It turns out there are certain words even blue-haired McCarthyites will defend from censorship. Guess what they are? Yep, expressions of support for the army of anti-Semites that murdered more Jews in one day than anyone else since the Nazis.
Seeing the neo-left rally around Kneecap has been equal parts hilarious and galling. Kneecap are in hot water following the emergence of video clips seeming to show them waving the Hezbollah flag at one of their gigs while yelling ‘Up Hamas, up Hezbollah’. They also told an audience that ‘The only good Tory is a dead Tory’ and ‘Kill your local MP’. Cue media outrage. Festivals are dropping them from their line-ups. Government ministers are pressuring Glastonbury to give them the heave-ho, too. Cops are investigating them. It’s guns out for Kneecap.
But they have defenders: the woke, their fellow congregants in the religion of Israelophobia. The Very Online left has taken a break from screaming ‘Nazis!’ at the lovely lesbians of the LGB Alliance to defend a band that praises a terror group that butchers Jews. In this warped moral universe it’s ‘hate speech’ to say Dave with his shrivelled knob is not a lesbian but fine to cheer a gang of religious reactionaries that would throw Dave off the top of a tall building before he could tell them his pronouns. Women stating biological facts – cancel them! Blokes in balaclavas saying ‘Up’ about a movement that rapes and kills Jews – defend them!
I am going to put this as plainly as I can: if you only pipe up about liberty when rappers are chastised for waving the flag of a virulently anti-Semitic movement, then you aren’t fighting for the right to speak freely – you’re fighting for the right to praise Jew-haters. If you normally couldn’t give a solitary shite about the liberty to utter but you cosplay as John Milton when rappers are punished for saying ‘Up Hamas’, then it isn’t freedom you’re defending – it’s Hamas. And here’s the thing: it’s depressing that the left’s defence of Kneecap is so riddled with hypocrisy and bigotry because Kneecap’s right to rap really should be defended. But by people who know what free speech is.
Regular readers of my spiked column will know I’m no fan of the hip-hop eejits from Belfast. Their Wikipedia page does a good job of summarising my view – that they ‘only offer a sanitised, bourgeois-friendly version of resistance that flatters rather than challenges establishment sensibilities’. Yet I think the campaign against them has gone way too far. We’re now in the territory of ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood or even the Sex Pistols, with hopping-mad elites seeking to gag a music act for saying saucy / dumb / nasty things. Home Office minister Dan Jarvis is even wagging a finger at Glastonbury and telling it to ditch Kneecap. I don’t like what Kneecap stands for, but I’ll tell you what I like even less: the idea that Dan fucking Jarvis should get to dictate the line-ups of music festivals.
People say Kneecap have crossed the line from opinion to incitement. Look, it’s ugly to say ‘Kill your local MP’, but is it incitement? No target was named, there was no prospect of imminent violence. It was more an infantile yelp of pseudo-revolt than an instruction to do harm. Let’s be frank: the Novara-reading Oxbridge tits who go to Kneecap’s London gigs are not going to kill anyone. Daddy would cut their allowance. I opposed the cop clampdowns on NWA when they rapped that they would ‘swarm on any motherfucker in a blue uniform’, and I’m equally opposed to cops meddling in the infinitely lamer Guardianista squeaking of three bellends from Belfast who bash Tories to titillate their bourgeois fans.
This is not to downplay the horribleness of Kneecap’s views. I’ve seen people compare the fury over their ‘Up Hamas’ blather with the rage that swirled around Sinéad O’Connor (RIP) after she ripped up a photo of the pope. Absolutely not. O’Connor believed, rightly or wrongly, that she was taking on religious tyranny. Kneecap are cosying up to literal religious tyrants. They’ve made supportive noises about movements of hard-right Islamists that brutally repress women, execute apostates and slaughter Jews. To some of us, saying ‘Up Hamas’ is as gross as saying ‘Up the KKK’. Don’t diss Sinéad by lumping her in with this sick sympathy for fascism that masquerades as youthful rebellion.
Kneecap are now saying they’ve never supported Hamas or Hezbollah. Waving a movement’s flag and reading its books is a weird way to show you don’t support it. One of the Kneecap fellas, the one who’s nearly 40 and wears a tricolour tea cosy on his head, posed with a copy of the collected speeches of the late Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah. That book calls Jews the ‘descendants of apes and pigs’. Do you think the Corbynista crew would defend a band that had posed with a book that calls black people ‘monkeys’? Of course they wouldn’t. Their rallying around Kneecap confirms not that they love free speech but that they couldn’t give a shit about Jews.
But here’s what Sinéad and Kneecap do have in common: both should have been free to express themselves. You don’t have to like Kneecap’s juvenile Tory hate or their flirting with the paraphernalia of Islamofascism, but you should support their right to engage in such reactionary antics. For the simple reason that we all lose out when the empire of censorship expands. It is a grave error to embolden the authoritarians of the police and the political class by pleading with them to go after Kneecap. This is an establishment that thinks it’s offensive to say ‘transwomen are men’ and that has harassed people for criticising Hamas. I want these censor-happy freaks to have less jurisdiction in the realm of belief and speech, not more. Actually, I want them to have none.
I understand people’s anger. Something is broken in Britain. Childminder Lucy Connolly is rotting in a cell for grossly tweeting ‘set fire to all the fucking hotels’ during the anti-immigrant riots after the Southport killings last year. And yet Kneecap get UK government grants and Guardian love despite bigging up Hamas and yapping about killing Tories. But the solution to such shameless two-tier morality is not to bang up Kneecap with Connolly – it’s to say both should be free.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
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