It’s all just useful distraction tactics, isn’t it?
We see it over and over again. Find something to change the narrative and/or focus – and get everyone all hot and bothered over that instead of the real news.
This week it was helpfully provided by a performer at Glastonbury – and the British media was obsessing over it for days. The news columns, radio call-ins and TV talk forums thus gleefully embraced the exaggerated outrage over Bob Vylan‘s ‘Death to the IDF’ chant – and cleverly used it to avoid discussing things like ongoing massacres at aid sites.
In fact, the real explosive story this weekend should’ve been the IDF admissions that they’ve been under instructions to shoot people queuing for food (see Haaretz here). Netanyahu and Katz called these admissions ‘blood libels‘.
Instead, the establishment media apparatus decided that a rapper and an Irish hip-hop act were the center of the universe.
And it isn’t just the usual right-wing pearl-clutchers: Labour government people were at it too.
But Kier Starmer’s government also needed the distraction, given that the extraordinary ineffectiveness and unpopularity of the government was top of the news agenda at that point.
There isn’t much more to say about the Glastonbury thing that I didn’t already say here about the initial Kneecap controversy a few weeks ago.
Repeatedly shifting the story away from the live-streamed ethnic cleansing operations and on to the trusty antisemitism game is well practiced strategy by now.
Edgy music acts being critical of genocide at a music festival shouldn’t really be shocking to anyone. If that’s how snowflake everyone’s become these days, god knows how they would’ve coped with people like Bob Marley, Sinead O’Connor, the Manic Street Preachers or many others in the past.
But again, this isn’t really about what was said on the Glastonbury stage – it’s about strategic distraction and narrative swapping.
It also gives the ultra Zionists and their British government and media servants another golden opportunity to attack and demonise the BBC. Yes, they still claim – somewhat comedically – that the BBC is antisemitic and has an anti-Israel bias.
In fact, the opposite has been demonstrated. We’ve examined that deliberate fallacy before (here, for example). The attacks on the BBC are part of a prefabricated agenda.
Is ‘Death to the IDF’ a little inflammatory? Sure, I guess.
Are documented war crimes maybe a bit *more* offensive? Should the government, the media and the right-wing manipulation machine maybe show as much concern over mass murder as they do over some words in a festival performance?
Contrast the amount of contrived media outrage and discussion over the Glastonbury incident with the complete silence over, for example, a senior minister in the Israeli government saying that all adults males in Gaza should be separated from the women and children and then executed (Srebrenica style, essentially).
No? No drawn-out media debates about that one? No official statements of contrived outrage from government ministers?
Here’s more of what the deputy parliament speaker Nissim Vaturi said. As well as referring to Palestinians as ‘sub humans‘, he suggested the West Bank city of Jenin should be made into anther Gaza, saying that Palestinians should be put there “so that they can be eliminated later“.
But… no, just tumbleweed silently wafting across the scene.
Let’s focus on Glastonbury instead: and the horror of some Israel apologists being possibly offended by some words.
Let’s not be concerned about IDF soldiers admitting they’re under instructions to shoot unarmed people queuing for aid.
Let’s also waste police time to ‘investigate‘ the rapper and what was said on the stage. We need to bring criminal charges.
Is everyone in the crowd also going to need to be investigated for joining in? I mean, why not? This government, after all, has also just proscribed a peaceful protest group as a terrorist organisation – when all they need to be charged with is vandalism or, at best, criminal damage.
But again, I’ve been saying it for ages: *everyone* is might be a ‘terrorist’ eventually. The definition has been stretched to the point of meaninglessness now. Journalists, protesters, activists… eventually, I assume, Gary Lineker. Who else? Ms Rachel, certainly.
We may as well go full Draconian at this point, right? Investigate that whole Glastonbury crowd.
While we’re at it, arrest the BBC. What else? Deport Gary Lineker, I guess.
Also, even the ‘From the river to the sea’ chant (which was also a feature in the Bob Vylan rant) is still being cited as calling for the eradication of the Jewish state: when in fact it’s been well established that it was a Zionist mantra implying ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians – and was adopted and reworded by Palestinians.
But the corporate-controlled media is careful to never acknowledge that: and the professional antisemitism pushers are still constantly citing this mantra as evidence of some hypothetical genocidal intent against Jews (to cleverly serve as a counterpoint to the *actual* ethnic cleansing that is currently being conducted in Gaza).
Anyway, the point is that this is all deliberate distraction. Bob Vylan actually did the Israelis and the UK government a favour this week by shifting the conversation. And you could taste how much the media relished it.
