Nicole Lampert
Jewish Chronicle, May 6, 2025
“I see artists in our company accuse Israel of genocide and deny its right to exist while painting Hamas as the good guys.”
Itay Kashti will never know whether it was one of his comments on social media pushing back against the anti-Israel narrative in the music industry that led to him eventually being kidnapped. He just has a hunch
that it was.
A record producer who has lived in the UK for nearly two decades, his case – where he was lured to a remote farmhouse in Wales before being physically beaten up and handcuffed to a radiator – was certainly motivated by antisemitism. The three attackers, who were each jailed for eight years in March, had a plan to keep him hostage and then extort money from his family, who they believed were rich.
“Even the police weren’t able to tell me where this thing started but it seems that someone who worked with me or knew of me had given them my name,” he says. “I believe it was probably a product of a heated debate. I had a lot of friends in the music industry who were posting about the war and against Israel and I was responding to them.
“In the group chat between the three kidnappers, the conversation very quickly turned from calling me ‘the music producer’ to ‘the Israeli’ and then just ‘the Jew’.”
After his attackers were sentenced and the story became public, Kashti was approached by some of his former friends, people he had fallen out with after October 7. People who had put the Palestinian flags on their social media on October 8 and told him, “Well, those people shouldn’t have been living there in the first place” when he challenged them about Hamas’s murderous rampage.
“A couple of my former friends reached out but they didn’t make any connection with what they had written about Israel,” he says. “There was no remorse or accountability. Nothing along the lines of, ‘Yes, I now see things in a slightly different light.’ So, it felt more that what they were really saying was, ‘I’m sorry this happened to you, but unfortunately you are still the bad guys.’”…SOURCE