The popular Irish rap group “Kneecap”

Introduction
Opposition to Israel is growing, especially among the youth around the world. Every attempt to silence this opposition backfires. Right now, that attempt to silence it focuses on the youth culture arena, and as Steve Bannon says, “politics is downstream from culture.” The most recent example was the Glastonbury music/rap festival where BBC wouldn’t livestream the popular – and anti-Zionist – group “Kneecap” and livestreamed Bob Vylan instead. Huge blunder for them! Further attempts to silence these groups have only made them even more popular. But what is it about them, Kneecap in particular, that created their popularity in the first place? “Tom”, Irish American blue collar worker, socialist and union activist explains:

I am 32 years old and I grew up in a working class Irish neighborhood in a big city on the East Coast. Everybody around me is very Irish to a fault. St. Patrick’s Day is a big holiday. Lots of Irish symbology everywhere, lots of associations of Ireland, lots of Irish immigrants, legal and illegal, all over the place. In other words, being Irish is a big deal around here.

I first heard of Kneecap in 2017
They rap in Irish and all of their content is anti British, pro Irish unification, and has like a socialist bent to it. Everything that they do, they largely rap in Irish so that people can understand everything they’re saying. And also whenever they play live, it’s wild as hell, because they give away free cocaine and free ecstasy to people. And so when I first heard them I just thought, “that sounds really interesting. But there’s no fucking way that guys who rap in Irish and basically throw like, something between a mosh and a rave while screaming about Maggie Thatcher is gonna hit in any significant way. They’re gonna be an underground group forever. This is going to be a very niche thing, and it’s interesting that I got to hear about them. It’d be cool to see them, but there’s no way this takes off. There’s no way this has universal appeal, this is very niche to like a particular subset of Irish leftists, you know, who like to party. There was no way that they would be able to have any commercial success.”

Also, as far as Israel, they were not a band saying, “oh, you know, we need to have a better relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians. “ They would get up and say, “Fuck Israel. Up Hamas, up Hezbollah, up anyone who’s fighting against the State of Israel,” because they they’re from Belfast and hey basically view Israel the same way they view the Brits – just in total direct opposition to it. So I just knew there was no way they could ever take off, because these guys will never shut up about Palestine, and they’re totally willing to say it in the most explicit terms possible.

But today they are the most popular non English rappers in the world. While they rap in English, they don’t have a single song that’s out that doesn’t utilize Irish.

wall murals in Belfast

Kneecap come from an Irish Republican political tradition which sees that conflict of peoples oppressed by imperialist powers as an international working class issue, and the interests of those peoples are aligned. That’s like a major tenet of the Irish Republican Army and Sinn Fein’s politics. So for example, during apartheid in South Africa, they had lots of links to the ANC in a mental way.

So if you go to North of Ireland, it’s not Irish flags or Union Jacks you’ll see; it’s Israeli flags and Palestinian flags. So Kneecap has to support the liberation of Palestine at all times in every venue. That is a given. And they have this kind of punk rock aesthetic of going extreme and even supporting groups that they don’t actually support, but they do it to the for the shock value and to be controversial. It’s gotten them into these massive legal issues with the British government simultaneously, but they’ve become a standard bearer for those in the artistic community who say, “I am unapologetically pro Palestine and anti Israel. You can take away my career, you can take away my freedom. You can take away my life. I’m not shifting from this position” In earlier times that would have meant obscurity, but in the current moment, that actually has catapulted them into this large level international fame.

So this says is that the traditional mechanisms that Zionist infrastructure has always been able to rely on are not working anymore. They’ve burned out. They’ve appropriated the idea of anti semitism too much to where it doesn’t have as much value as it used to have, which is dangerous for other reasons. And ironically, it’s created a situation with the youth where if Zionist powers are against something and are trying to repress it, people say, “well, there must be something to that.”

Mo Chara is basicallythe front man for Kneecap. He’s been brought up on charges of aiding and abetting terrorism because

Mo Chara waving the Hezbollah flag

he waved a Hezbollah flag. It’s way overblown. There’s no legitimate reason to think he’s providing material support for terrorism. They said there’s a credible chance that he’s actually going to go to jail, and he’s said I’m not apologizing to anybody or shifting my opinions on anything to do with Israel, and if I go to jail for it, so be it. That has been some of the best publicity they can possibly get, because the youth and the culture of the youth has just fundamentally shifted.

Bob Vylan after his chant “death to the IDF”

Glastonbury music festival
So, the Glastonbyry music/rap festival is the second biggest rap festival in all of Europe. BBC didn’t want to livestream Kneecap at it. So they pulled away during Kneecap performance to go over to Bob Vylan, which is a rap duo which is pretty popular in the UK, and around different parts of the world as well. The BBC didn’t want to have anti Israel sentiments expressed live on BBC. So Bob Vylan chanted “death to the IDF” and the crowd chanted along with him!

This is showing that they can’t actually run away from this stuff. It’s not possibl. They pull over to somebody else other than Kneecap and that group pushed the envelope even farther; they were even more defiant of the pressures that are being put down.

So now Bob Vylan has been dropped by his representation. He got canceled from this other festival is supposed to be at called Radar. Bob Vylan is still a big act, but he’s not a crazy big act like Kneecap. So Radar said that they can’t have him on now because he’s become part of the news story of chanting death to the IDF Once the festival announced that The Scratch, which is a rock band from Ireland, said, “Well, if you’re canceling Bob Vylan, we’re not going to play. Sorry.” And then we just saw today, Hans Zimmer, who is a mainstream composer, put out a statement saying Glastonbury is not the story; the genocide in Gaza is the story. It used to be that when you do something like this, they would lay the law down and say you are not allowed to talk like this, and everybody else would shut up. Not happening anymore.

Others are saying, “oh shit, you know, I don’t want to let Kneecap get this far ahead of me in this moment. I gotta catch up to where they’re at, because this is where the youth is headed.”

Elton John and Kneecap

A year or two ago, Elton John had Kneecap on his podcast. And he was like, “not everybody gets what you’re doing. I get what you’re doing. Your energy, what you’re trying to do is where the youth are at. This is the next big thing.” There’s no way his team hadn’t done some research and told Elton John you’d better be careful because this group is really anti-Israel”, and he was still saying this to Kneecap – that’s Elton fucking John, like the most blue chip mainstream musician you can get! Elton John was saying, No, this is the next wave. These guys are going to kill it. And he seems to have been very correct.

For my entire time growing up, criticizing Israel was not allowed. You can say things about the Jews, but you can’t say things about Israel. You can say the Jews are greedy. That’s not anti semitic; it’s just a fact is how it was viewed in my community. The way it was viewed is you just say stuff about Jewish people, it’s fine. You say anything about Israel, that’s not okay, and that’s just been flipped on its fucking head. Like, being anti Israel was like being anti American In a way, this is true. Israel was seen as an extension of the United States in that part of the world.

And what I’ve realized as I’ve got older is basically, we’re all taught a Jabotinsky perspective on Israel. We just weren’t told about Vladimir Jabotinsky. [Vladimir Jabotinsky was the firsr Zionist leader to call for an independent state of Israel. He was also a fascist.] I was taught a very Jabotinskyist perspective on the situation. “They did something evil to us, so now we’re going to do something do something evil to somebody else. And if you question us, you’re against us. If you’re against us, well, we’re going to fuck you up too.” That’s an oversimplification of Jabotinsky, but in some ways it’s accurate. If we look at what Netanyahu has really done, his policies, the people he surrounded himself with, a lot of it is the total ideological victory of the Jabotansky vision for Israel,

Plus, he was an overt fascist, which is what we see Zionism to be. You can color it any way you want, but when you’re saying, “my group of people, my blood, or whatever, are better than all other groups of people and are entitled to certain things that nobody else is. And if anyone tries to stop us, we’re going to use violence and repress them,” that’s pretty fucking fascist, you know.

So to get back yo my main point:This this is where culture is really going to start to influence politics. Talking to all the younger Irish Americans that I know around here, I know a lot of these people. They have reasonably decent politics, but say a lot of dumb shit. I tell people Kneecap might not be coming in October, and they’re like “why”? And I say, “well, because they’re suspending their visas, they’re not letting them in the United States because they support Palestine.” Just yesterday this one girl told me, “who gives a shit whether they support Palestine or not, they’re allowed to say whatever they want.” I said, “Well, Donald Trump gives a shit.” This woman is nominally supportive of Trump, but the first thing out of her mouth was, “fuck him”.

You get in between people and music or what they want to do. You start saying “you’re not allowed to listen to this thing you enjoy, and we’re not letting this in here”, that’s gonna have a political impact, because you’re making the situation political. These people didn’t view it as political. They just see it as, like, a fucking awesome time. It’s an Irish rap group. You know what I’m saying? One of the things that Kneecap really does for a lot of Irish people is it says you don’t have to feel awkward being at a hip hop concert, you know, culturally appropriating anything. “This is my culture”. It’s like a bunch of Irish people. We have a white whatever we have, like our own cultural identity too, and we’re expressing it. Are you going to tell Irish people in the United States saying, “Uh, no, the biggest expression of the cultural identity for all the youth is illegal here?” Not a popular political decision. So the more that they try to repress that, the more it drives a lot of young people who really are apolitical in a lot of ways, to become political and oppose Zionism.

Attempts to suppress NWA failed miserably.

NWA
Think of it this way: You remember when NWA came out with, Straight out of Compton and Fuck the police, like a major record, you know, like, Fuck the police became this big controversial thing. Of course, the state came down and said, “You’re not allowed to play. Fuck the police. We’re repressing this. We’re not allowing them on the radio. We’re getting rid of them.”

So, the result was you never heard of NWA ever again until the end of time, right? They didn’t become one of the most influential groups to all music the late 20th to 21st Century. They just disappeared, right? Just the opposite! Ice Cube is a household name now. Easy E is one of the most legendary people in the history of music. They engaged in a campaign in the United States of severe repression of NWA. All it did was make a bigger deal. And all it did was make everybody else try and do anything in hip hop try to replicate them. This stuff has the opposite effect. They still try to do it because they don’t know any other way to respond. It has the opposite effect.

LL Cool J
Black hip hop groups are going to have to start taking it up too. if they want to maintain their audience. I mean, we just saw today LL Cool J was supposed to play the Welcome America Festival, which they hold that on Fourth of July every year in Philadelphia. And he said, “I’m not going on because it would require crossing a picket line. No fucking way.” [This was a reference to the strike of Philadelphia city workers.] In another era, LL Cool J would have felt compelled to go on, but he knows now that if he crosses a picket line to go on stage, there’s going to be a lot of backlash from his fans.

Kneecap won’t cave
In summation: There are artists that are going to cave after a certain point if you mess enough with their fame and their money, but if you tell Kneecap, “we’re going to kill all of you if you don’t stop saying this stuff,” they’re willing to die behind this. And I don’t think that Hollywood is ready for this situation. Kneecap is going to set an example to other artists, because the more they repress them, and the more Kneecap keeps fighting, other artists are going to feel like, “god damn it, I look like a fucking hack, not saying anything about Palestine.”

And come October, if they are touring, every single concert is going to be a political rally, because they’re not coming to the United States without condemning Trump, condemning Rubio, condemning everything. And they won’t limit it to just Palestine. They’ll be condemning ICE. They’ll be expanding it. They’re not going to just stop with the issue of Palestine, they’re going to be talking more broad based, talking about the need for revolution in the United States, all of that. If they don’t let them in, people are going to wonder, why the fuck am I not allowed to see Kneecap?

So that’s a lose-lose for the ruling class, and it’s a win-win for Kneecap at the end of the day. And they can’t shut them out entirely. There’s lots of Americans that went to see them in tGlasgow. And now they’re going to Netherlands. I think they’re going to Germany for a bit. That’ll be a little dicey. It’s hard to say. The point is they’re going on this tour, and they’re not going to change what they’re saying or doing. It’s not happening. So if that means that more governments want to try and repress them, that’s a fight they’re willing to have, and I don’t see any way they lose it.

Oaklandsocialist comments: More important than Kneecap not going to change anything that they are saying or doing is the fact that their unwillingness to change is actually boosting their careers, rather than harming it. It’s such an important indication of the mood among tens of millions of young people around the world.

Finally, regarding Bannon’s comment that politics is downstream from culture: culture is really just the general way in which people perceive and relate to the world around them, the way they relate to it through music, through art, through clothing styles, through the latest slang, everything. And at the end of the day that plays a huge role in shaping people’s views and actions around overtly “political” issues, from Israel and Palestine, to the issue of immigration, to you name it. We should never forget that.

The crowd at the Glastonbury festival. Note the Irish flag along with the Palestinian flags