As Kneecap and Bob Vylan face outcry, who really deserves to see justice?

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Street Justice. That’s what West Belfast’s Paddy McCorry posted on Instagram, after beating the shit out of an IDF soldier while yelling ​“Free Palestine” in his face, sort of like when American neo-nazi Richard Spencer was punched in the head while doing an interview, but not exactly. You see, this was not a roll around on the cobbles, but an organised, sanctioned MMA bout in Rome on May 31^st, as part of the Cage Warriors 189 fight card. Footage of the beatdown and McCorry raising the Palestinian flag in victory afterwards went viral.

His opponent, Shuki Farage, spent his twenty-fifth birthday in Gaza, posing with his machine gun in front of destroyed residential buildings and then posting them on social media. Another series of photos from last January, which features him cosying up to some cute street dogs, is simply captioned ​“Gaza 2024” like he’s been on a lads’ holiday. If he and his brothers-in-arms were slaughtering those pups, what would our flaccid political class be calling for? Of course, we don’t know if Farage committed war crimes in Gaza. We do know that over 56,000 Palestinians have been killed there since the genocide began, and that the IDF kills a child in Gaza every 45 minutes. And we know that Farage trains at the Michaelson gym in Ramla, Israel, where its founder, Daniel Michaelson, had been posting regularly about murdering Palestinians on Facebook – although those posts are now locked.

It figures that if you serve in an army that specialises in killing civilians, you’d be crap at actual fighting. Farage got battered, humiliated and sent packing. In a sport where one of your aims is to render your opponent unconscious, the violence of the footage – consensual and bound by rules – is irrelevant. So what we’re left with is the image of a man with a moral compass – who happens to be good at scrapping – shouting ​“Free Palestine” at the actual teeth of the genocide in Gaza, instead of at the sky or a well-protected embassy like thousands upon thousands of us have been doing regularly since it lurched into motion. There was a grain of catharsis in seeing Shuki Farage get slapped about and yelled at. Was that justice for the 20 people who were shot and killed by the IDF that day, while waiting for food at a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) site, though?

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Justice is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, doom scrolling through Israeli war crimes as my daughter sleeps in the room next door. My Explore page – at the time of writing – is a psychotic mix of Mac Miller clips, classic boxing knockouts, parenting tips, beautiful women in leggings doing deep squats, and death. In one video, a young man pedals desperately away from a GHF breadline in Rafah that turned into yet another massacre, the body of his father draped across his lap like a roll of carpet – another nightmarish image burned into my consciousness. I put myself in that young man’s shoes and could think only of violence.

To recap, the GHF – described by a New York Times investigative report last week as an ​“Israeli brainchild” – was concocted by a group of officials called the Mikveh Yisrael Forum. A former CIA officer handles security and a former US marine was the executive director. Just before the GHF began operations, he stepped down. Perhaps it dawned on him that a genocidal army isn’t the most reliable distributor of aid. In stepped batshit evangelical leader Johnnie Moore, who lapped up Trump’s ​“Riviera of the Middle East” plan like a miniature Schnauzer laps up fox shit. Since then, around 500 Palestinians have been murdered by the IDF on the way to GHF sites or while waiting in line for food.

The ​“world’s most moral army”, according to The Telegraph, used starving people for target practice while also bombing the ​“existential threat” out of Iran, beginning on June 13. The ​“existential threat” included 935 people. 38 of them were children. During the 12-day war, the Iranian military fired approximately 500 ballistic missiles and 1,000 drones back at Israel, killing 28 people. Footage showed groups of Palestinians celebrating Iran’s retaliation. When you’re trying to survive humanity’s gravest atrocities, why wouldn’t the feeling of justice, however fleeting, sound like a bomb exploding on your murderer’s doorstep? But for us lot over here, safe behind our smartphones, cheering on the fireworks, what happens to the space we hold for Mahsa Amini – the Kurdish-Iranian woman beaten to death by Iran’s morality police – and the 500 people killed for protesting her murder? Cognitive dissonance is a helluva drug.

The bloodletting in Gaza continued as the UK’s music and culture editors converged on Glastonbury’s West Holts Stage to remind us that ​“Kneecap is not the story” by posting about Kneecap. But the frontman of punk-rap duo Bob Vylan poured diesel on Kneecap’s bonfire by leading the crowd in chants of, ​“death, death to the IDF,” to a sea of Palestinian flags as their set was live streamed on the BBC. Emily Eavis scrambled to accuse them of antisemitism and inciting violence on Insta. Keir Starmer whinged about ​“appalling hate speech”. Avon and Somerset police announced an investigation ​“relating to hate crimes”. And the duo had their US visas revoked for glorifying violence, which is funny coming from the place where death machines do flyovers at sporting events and you can buy a Glock from the supermarket. Bob Vylan are getting all this flak because their language, aimed at an army committing genocide halfway across the globe, was violent and visceral.

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But it wasn’t more violent and visceral than the IDF massacring 13 people at the GHF aid site in Rafah, on the eve of Bob Vylan’s set. Or their bombing of the Osama Bin Zaid School in Northern Gaza, which burnt eight people alive, including a tiny baby girl. Or of the entire Abu Amsha family, who were sheltering in a tent near the Holy Family School west of Gaza City, their history reaching back towards the dawn of time ended in a terrifying instant by an IDF bomb. All three of these atrocities happened on the same day. Amid the endless horror and actual death in Gaza, some musicians chanting ​“death, death to the IDF” on a festival stage in a field should fade into insignificance. But their protest is both more heinous and insatiably newsworthy, apparently, than the baby killers our government sells weapons to. How should we treat genocidaires, then? And what does justice look like?

Rob Kazandjian is a culture and music writer who hosts Huck’s Hard Feelings column. Follow him on Instagram.

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