Brendan O’Neill
Spiked, Apr. 30, 2025
“Kneecap are now saying they’ve never supported Hamas or Hezbollah. Waving a movement’s flag and reading its books is a weird way to show you don’t support it.”
The woke left loves a good censoring. They’re thrilled when feminists are blacklisted for saying people with cocks aren’t women. They gleefully No Platform far-right tub-thumpers. They sprint for the fainting couch if the BBC gives airtime to a ‘climate denier’. Yet now, suddenly, they’ve come out for free speech. It turns out there are certain words even blue-haired McCarthyites will defend from censorship. Guess what they are? Yep, expressions of support for the army of anti-Semites that murdered more Jews in one day than anyone else since the Nazis.
Seeing the neo-left rally around Kneecap has been equal parts hilarious and galling. Kneecap are in hot water following the emergence of video clips seeming to show them waving the Hezbollah flag at one of their gigs while yelling ‘Up Hamas, up Hezbollah’. They also told an audience that ‘The only good Tory is a dead Tory’ and ‘Kill your local MP’. Cue media outrage. Festivals are dropping them from their line-ups. Government ministers are pressuring Glastonbury to give them the heave-ho, too. Cops are investigating them. It’s guns out for Kneecap.
But they have defenders: the woke, their fellow congregants in the religion of Israelophobia. The Very Online left has taken a break from screaming ‘Nazis!’ at the lovely lesbians of the LGB Alliance to defend a band that praises a terror group that butchers Jews. In this warped moral universe it’s ‘hate speech’ to say Dave with his shrivelled knob is not a lesbian but fine to cheer a gang of religious reactionaries that would throw Dave off the top of a tall building before he could tell them his pronouns. Women stating biological facts – cancel them! Blokes in balaclavas saying ‘Up’ about a movement that rapes and kills Jews – defend them! …SOURCE