Twenty-one years ago, a clip from Da Ali G Show caused a storm when it showed ‘Borat’ (Sacha Baron Cohen) performing a song titled ‘In My Country There Is Problem’ at a country-western bar in Tucson, Arizona. The chorus includes the road ‘Throw the Jew down the well, so my country may be free’, with other lyrics accusing Jews of being money grabbers and having sharp teeth. The clip shows among the patrons within the bar, clapping, singing along and making signs of devils’ horns on their heads. Cohen is a Jew and the piece was intended as satire. Today it could be seen as reality.
I used to be reminded of this once I watched with incredulity because the mainly white middle class English home counties set who can afford to attend Glastonbury chanted and sang together with the punk-rap duo Bob Vylan, “death, death to the IDF.” This was not satire. This was not Iran – “death to the good Satan and death to the little Satan”. This was not Borat in an Arizona country club. This was not a Nuremberg rally. This was the UK within the twenty first Century.
For those that are unaware (probably a lot of the Glastonbury mob), most Israelis must serve within the IDF with a view to protect their country – a rustic which was arrange after the horrors of the Holocaust to offer a shelter for the Jews of their traditional land. A rustic which is surrounded by lots of of tens of millions of people who find themselves determined to wipe it, and them, out.
When the Glastonbury mob were calling for death to the IDF, they were in effect calling for the death of Israeli Jews. The rise of anti-semitism within the UK (and other Western countries) inside living memory of the Holocaust is a profoundly disturbing sign.
Another aspect of that is the return of the infamous anti-Jewish blood libel – the notion that the Jews are baby killers who go around deliberately in search of to kill ‘Gentile’ infants. In passing I note the inconsistency of those that claim to be concerned concerning the death of innocent babies in Gaza, while also describing the killing of tens of millions of babies within the womb as a human right.
The excuse is trotted out: ‘This has nothing to do with being anti-Jewish, it’s nearly caring for people who find themselves being killed.’ Since April 2023, some 150,000 people have been killed, 11 million have been displaced and one other 26 million are facing starvation. But that’s not in Gaza – it’s in Sudan. Why are there no protests, encampments or rappers singing at Glastonbury about Sudan? Because it doesn’t involve Israel and the Jews.
The chilling callousness and hypocrisy of the middle-class mob is made much more evident once you realise that they’re flying the flags of an organisation that massacred 378 festival-goers at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023. Forty hostages were taken at that festival – a number of of whom are still considered to be alive. Yet here were mainly white, liberal, progressive festival-goers celebrating their killers and kidnappers. I even have written before of the culture of death smothering Britain. This is yet one more manifestation of that.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt in her 1963 book on Eichmann spoke of the banality of evil – the concept that evil doesn’t have to return clothed in horns and march with jackboots, but can stem from extraordinary individuals who follow orders, habits, or group/mob actions without ever occupied with the moral implications. The incontrovertible fact that it just isn’t ‘rednecks’ in a bar in Arizona who’re chanting death wishes for Jews, but nice, ‘educated’, middle class festival-goers in England demonstrates just how evil can get a grip – in probably the most banal way, amongst probably the most banal people.
Arendt was not saying that banality makes the evil any less dangerous – fairly that it makes it more so. The chilling thing about Glastonbury was that this was a mob of ‘nice’ individuals who were dancing and chanting and waving flags – not raising Heil Hitler salutes. But their ignorance, prejudice and bigotry is just as dangerous, if no more so. The one results in the opposite.
As well as banality, it’s the illogicality of evil that struck me. Glastonbury demonstrates that in other ways as well. People chanted and applauded in the identical way as people like Jeremy Corbyn spoke of no partitions and borders. They sloganised – ‘construct bridges, not partitions’ – blissfully unself-aware that they’d all paid a minimum of $400 to get behind the huge, expensive security wall that was built around Glastonbury – to maintain the plebs out. They were on the within, separated from the remainder by a wall which they’d paid for, demanding ‘no more partitions’!
Yet one other disturbing aspect of that is that the mob are easily aroused online. I watched on my X feed as Rod Stewart was mocked, abused and demonised simply because of an interview he gave in The Times where he asked for people to present Nigel Farage a likelihood. Although his actual performance at Glastonbury seems to have been well received, the day before, Kneecap, the Irish rap band who’re in trouble for apparently supporting Hezbollah and allegedly telling people “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP”, mocked Stewart by calling him “older than Israel” and “Rod the Prod” – thus bringing sectarian religious bigotry into their poisonous mix.
Some have argued that that is just the exercise of free speech – although in a civilised society all free speech has limits, incitement to murder being one obvious one. But that doesn’t matter to the politicians, commentators, journalists and celebrities who seek to justify this hatred. And again, note how all these ‘nice’ people were cheering a band whose very name celebrates the shooting of young teenagers within the knees as a type of punishment.
Britain is in a really dark place when at a significant music festival 1000’s chant for the death of Israeli Jews, and that is broadcast the world over by the BBC – after which on social media.
What is the answer? It is feasible to just accept that among the IDF have done horrible things in Gaza, and likewise to disagree with the Israeli government’s policy without desiring their death. To polarise and hate just isn’t the Christian way. There is a greater way. My mind turns immediately to Paul’s beautiful words to the Ephesian church: “For he himself is our peace, who has made the 2 groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14).
Glastonbury builds partitions and fuels hatred. The only approach to destroy that is thru the proclamation of the Good News of Christ. He alone can cope with the hatred of the mob, the irrationality of the ‘progressive’ mind, the weakness of the politicians, and the perversity of the human heart.
David Robertson is minister of Scots Kirk in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. He blogs at the Wee Flea.
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