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 line ‘Throw the Jew down the well, so my country can be free’, with other lyrics accusing Jews of being money grabbers and having sharp teeth. The clip shows some of the patrons in 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 would be seen as reality.
I was reminded of this when I watched with incredulity as the mainly white middle class English home counties set who can afford to attend Glastonbury chanted and sang along with the punk-rap duo Bob Vylan, “death, death to the IDF.” This was not satire. This was not Iran - “death to the great 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 in the 21st Century.
For those who are unaware (probably most of the Glastonbury mob), most Israelis have to serve in the IDF in order to protect their country - a country which was set up after the horrors of the Holocaust to provide a safe haven for the Jews in their traditional land. A country which is surrounded by hundreds of millions of people who are 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 in the UK (and other Western countries) within living memory of the Holocaust is a profoundly disturbing sign.
Another aspect of this is the return of the infamous anti-Jewish blood libel – the notion that the Jews are baby killers who go around deliberately seeking to kill ‘Gentile’ infants. In passing I note the inconsistency of those who claim to be concerned about the death of innocent babies in Gaza, while also describing the killing of millions of babies in the womb as a human right.
The excuse is trotted out: ‘This has nothing to do with being anti-Jewish, it’s just about caring for people who are being killed.’ Since April 2023, some 150,000 people have been killed, 11 million have been displaced and another 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 even more evident when you realise that they are 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 few of whom are still considered to be alive. Yet here were mainly white, liberal, progressive festival-goers celebrating their killers and kidnappers. I have written before of the culture of death smothering Britain. This is yet another manifestation of that.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt in her 1963 book on Eichmann spoke of the banality of evil - the idea that evil doesn’t have to come clothed in horns and march with jackboots, but can stem from ordinary people who follow orders, habits, or group/mob actions without ever thinking about the moral implications. The fact that it is not ‘rednecks’ in a bar in Arizona who are chanting death wishes for Jews, but nice, ‘educated’, middle class festival-goers in England demonstrates just how evil can get a grip – in the most banal way, among the most banal people.
Arendt was not saying that banality makes the evil any less dangerous – rather that it makes it more so. The chilling thing about Glastonbury was that this was a mob of ‘nice’ people who were dancing and chanting and waving flags – not raising Heil Hitler salutes. But their ignorance, prejudice and bigotry is just as dangerous, if not more so. The one leads to the other.
As well as banality, it is the illogicality of evil that struck me. Glastonbury demonstrates that in other ways as well. People chanted and applauded in the same way as people like Jeremy Corbyn spoke of no walls and borders. They sloganised - ‘build bridges, not walls’ - blissfully unself-aware that they had all paid at least $400 to get behind the massive, expensive security wall that was built around Glastonbury – to keep the plebs out. They were on the inside, separated from the rest by a wall which they had paid for, demanding ‘no more walls’!
Yet another disturbing aspect of this is that the mob are easily aroused online. I watched on my X feed as Rod Stewart was mocked, abused and demonised just because of an interview he gave in The Times where he asked for people to give Nigel Farage a chance. Although his actual performance at Glastonbury seems to have been well received, the day before, Kneecap, the Irish rap band who are 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 this 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 in the knees as a form of punishment.
Britain is in a very dark place when at a major music festival thousands chant for the death of Israeli Jews, and this is broadcast across the world by the BBC – and then on social media.
What is the solution? It is possible to accept that some of the IDF have done horrible things in Gaza, and also to disagree with the Israeli government's policy without desiring their death. To polarise and hate is not the Christian way. There is a better way. My mind turns immediately to Paul's beautiful words to the Ephesian church: "For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility" (Ephesians 2:14).
Glastonbury builds walls and fuels hatred. The only way to destroy that is through the proclamation of the Good News of Christ. He alone can deal 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.
