Glastonbury and the Banality of Antisemitism

While the punk rapper Bob Vylan’s call-and-response of “death to the IDF, death to the IDF” at the Glastonbury Festival in somnolent Somerset was bad enough — so bad that the expression of homicidal hate led to the American government revoking his visa so that his American tour has been cancelled — still worse was the reaction of the audience. The Nuremburg rally-like atmosphere, with cheers for Vylan and jeers for those whose death he called for, the members of the only military in the world that is prepared to defend the Jewish people and their tiny, embattled state, was horrifying.

Tom Slater is a British journalist and the editor of Spiked. He has just delivered himself of some thoughts on the spectacle at Glastonbury, the music festival where this year, antisemitic sentiments by performers were cheerfully applauded by an audience of moral cretins. More on what happened at Glastonbury can be found here: “Bob Vylan, Glastonbury and the banality of Jew hatred,” by Tom Slater, Spiked, June 29, 2025:

If you can’t see it now, you never will. The sight of tens of thousands of people at Glastonbury yesterday joining in a spirited chant of ‘Death, death to the IDF’ was the sight of us officially becoming a very different country, I fear. One in which anti-Israel hysteria has so flawlessly rehabilitated Jew hatred that it has become unthinking, conformist, almost mundane. Something that Home Counties idiots can jive to before adjusting their hot pants and heading off to catch Charli XCX. Something that is broadcast by the BBC into millions of homes. The banality of the new anti-Semitism.

Let’s not muck about here. When punk-rap duo Bob Vylan called for the killing of Israeli soldiers yesterday – as they warmed up the crowd at the West Holts Stage for every Israelophobe’s new favourite Irish rap trio, Kneecap – they weren’t opposing war. They were calling for war, and on the one army on Earth charged with protecting Jews from genocide. The army now at war with a jihadist cult that murdered, raped and kidnapped its way through an Israeli festival not unlike Glastonbury on 7 October 2023. The army that almost all Israelis are expected to serve in. Indeed, those making excuses for that sickening call-and-response yesterday hopefully don’t know that Hamas justifies killing Israeli civilians on the grounds that they are basically all tainted by national service. That they are all enemy combatants. Death, death to that IDF?

Whether we got here by ignorance or conscious hatred is pretty much moot. The end result is British Jews – at Glasto or at home – watching thousands whoop as Jew-killing slogans are recited. Frontman Bobby Vylan also treated the crowd to a deranged rant about the indignities he suffered working for a ‘Zionist’ at a record label, because he had to listen to his boss talk favourably about Israel. I wonder if he knows that the vast majority of British Jews are Zionists. I wonder if he cares. ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, Vylan chanted at another point in his fetid little set. Surely he knows what this means? Surely he recalls the tiny, 10million-strong nation that lies between the River Jordan and the Med, 74 per cent of which is Jewish? Surely he knows that when the Islamofascists currently menacing Israel chant it they are explicitly calling for the genocide of Jews? Bob?…

British Jews have known for some time that they cannot rely on that lot for solidarity. All the more reason for the sane, truly anti-racist majority – those who can see what is going on and are quietly horrified by it – to stand with their Jewish brothers and sisters, loudly and proudly. This really isn’t their problem. It’s ours.

Nothing more need be said about the grobians at Glastonbury, and about the duty of those who have kept their sanity to denounce and consign to the outer darkness not just the punk rappers who whip up their audiences with hate-the-Jews rhetoric, but also those baby-faced stormtroopers in their sandals, t-shirts, and keffiyehs who take such delight in the expression of these murderous sentiments.