The British police opens an investigation for the screams towards the Israeli military on the Glastonbury Festival | Culture | EUROtoday

The penultimate scandal of the Glastonbury Festival, the biggest outside musical occasion on the earth and an entire cultural and countercultural phenomenon with half a century of life, accommodates all of the elements of a purely British entrap Hypocrisy The Avon and Somerset Police Department, whose jurisdiction corresponds to every thing that will occur at that social gathering, has lastly opened an investigation to the Punk-Rap Bob Vylan group, for shouting on Saturday afternoon from the stage “death, death to the IDF” (“Death, Death to the Defense Forces of Israel”, the official name of the army of that country), and the Irish rap group Kneecap, who acted at the same time in the same stage and usually displayed Palestinian flags and slogans in favor of the Hezbollah terrorist group.

The police authorities are reviewing the video of both actions, and at the moment they frame the investigation in an apparent crime of public offense. They do not rule out, as the investigation progresses, that the object of their investigations becomes a possible crime of hate.

The BBC did not broadcast in any of its conventional chains the Bob Vylan concert, but offered streaming live on its BBC Iplayer digital platform. In the case of the Kneecap concert, not even that, although he later incorporated a great fragment without editing the performance in his daily summary of the best moments of the festival, which he publishes on the platform. The Israel Embassy in the United Kingdom did not take long to sound the alarm in a statement in which he expressed his “deep disturbance for the incendiary rhetoric of hate” that, according to her, had expressed himself on stage, with slogans that “advocate for the dismantling of the state of Israel.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose almost unconditional support to Israel and his moderate condemnation of what happened in Gaza has irritated a large part of the Labor Party, was among the first to condemn what happened in Glastonbury and demand explanations to the BBC. “There is not any excuse for such a scandalous hate speech.

The BBC made its personal admission of guilt, and apologized for not having instantly reduce the published. And even the organizers of Glastonbury expressed their dismay: “As a festival, we are against any form of war or terrorism. We will always believe and campaign for hope, unity, peace and love,” Emily Eavis, one of many promoters of the occasion and infamous British feminist.

Little margin of shock

The Bob Vylan Group, whose two parts desire to maintain their actual names below the anonymity, are initially from London, and have been deciphering an explosive combination of punk and rap with aggressively politicians and provocative actions on stage.

Kneecap, the Belfast group, the capital of Northern Ireland, with republican affinities, has lengthy been devoted to glorifying the anger or Hezbollah. Its foremost singer, Liam Iog or Hannaidh, whose inventive identify is Mo Chara (my buddy, in Irish), appeared on June 18 earlier than a British courtroom for having deployed a Hezbollah flag on the London stadium in O2, throughout a live performance. Currently on bail, he offered himself on Saturday in Glastonbury as “a free man” and inspired these current to chant the cry “Fuck Keir Starmer”(Keir Starmer is fucking).

With all these background, the reaction of the organizers of the Festival or the BBC has ended up resembling that of capital Louis Renault, the film’s prefect of the film Casablanca that he is scandalized that there are bets and clandestine game in a place and then claims his profits. The proliferation of Palestinian flags in Glastonbury gave an approximate idea of ​​what communication between the public and the stage was going to be.

The response of everything that happened by the Bob Vylan Group has been a video statement in which they say that “claiming the end of the slaughter of innocents will never be something bad. To the civilians of Israel we ask that they do not understand this anger as something directed against them, and that they do not allow their government to convince them that a song against the army is a song against the people [de Israel]”.

The group’s performance was witnessed live by a few tens of thousands of spectators, along with those who could join in the streaming of the BBC. His notoriety, in the last hours, has increased considerably.

In 1976, journalist Bill Grundy interviewed the Sex Pistols within the BBC, which didn’t cease releasing obscenities all through this system. It is estimated that they noticed them between 5 and 6 million viewers. Public radiotelevision determined to ban the issuance of points corresponding to Anarchy within the UK o God Save the Queen. The British punk band turned a common and countercultural phenomenon that modified the musical pattern of many different nations.