By Josh White
Forget Gaza. The real story is Kneecap.
That’s what the British press wants you to believe.
The true scandal is that mainstream journalists are far more concerned with the provocative deeds of a Northern Irish rap group than the horrors being inflicted on Gaza.
Israeli forces have killed 54,000 Palestinians by conservative estimates, including 16,500 children. A blockade is threatening mass starvation. Every part of the coastal strip, which packs over two million inhabitants into a territory one-quarter the size of Greater London, has been reduced to rubble.
All this has happened with the support of the British establishment.
The Royal Air Force has been providing "intelligence" support to Israel via flights from Cyprus to Gaza.
None of this is political. No, definitely not. Stop asking questions.
Direct your attention instead to Kneecap, whose Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, better known as Mo Chara, now faces terrorism charges for flying the flag of Hezbollah, the Lebanese organisation fully banned by the UK government in 2021.
Manufacturing Outrage
Every scandal is, to some extent, a media creation, but some scandals are more manufactured than others.
Because Kneecap hail from Belfast, rap partially in Gaelige (Irish Gaelic), and traffic in symbols of the Republican cause, they are ideally suited for the task of distracting the British public.
The band’s principal offences to human decency include supposedly promoting Hamas and Hezbollah during a gig in November 2024; declaring their support for the Palestinian cause at California’s Coachella Festival in April; and telling their audience, “The only good Tory is a dead Tory! Kill your local MP!” at another gig in 2023.
Rightwing hacks want you to think that demands of this sort—the band has also urged fans to kill their landlords—cannot be interpreted as irony. As far as they are concerned, no musician in the history of music has ever said anything shocking.
Strangely, none of Kneecap’s provocations in the UK were deemed incendiary at the time of their making. It was only after the American right took notice that their British counterparts followed suit.
The bad faith and cowardice of the British press were once again on full display. Anyone not mired in moral doublethink can see this. However, the story still warrants a closer look.
The drama began with Kneecap’s appearance at Coachella in April. The band caused an uproar in the US simply by having a banner behind them reading: “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”
“It is being enabled by the US government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes,” the message continued. “Fuck Israel, free Palestine.”
Naturally, the National Review damned the Belfast trio as Antisemites. This was all very predictable.
Soon, Sharon Osbourne, of all people, was calling for Kneecap’s visas to be revoked. Worse still, Osbourne advised the band to be “more like Bono”. Kneecap responded by suggesting that she listen to Black Sabbath’s 1970 classic "War Pigs".
Suddenly, we were blessed with a whirlwind of articles in UK publications like The Spectator telling us Kneecap are “not rebels".
My favourite example of this line of attack was a piece by Tory councillor Tom Jones—no, not that Tom Jones—construing Kneecap as “the cultural establishment” in The Critic, a right-wing magazine owned by Conservative donor Jeremy Hosking.
The fact that Kneecap won funds from the British government has also been used to delegitimise them. But the band won the funds in a court case over discrimination and handed the cash to two youth centres in Northern Ireland, one Catholic and one Protestant.
To be fair, Kneecap has also come under fire for making concessions to their critics.
Kneecap apologised to the families of murdered MPs David Amess and Jo Cox, although their words had no bearing on those events. No doubt their lawyers advised the band to make an immediate statement in order to soften the blow ahead of any charges.
While most Kneecap fans think these hysterics are beyond daft, some regard the apology as a bad move. Others have deemed the band “sell-outs” or worse.
Naturally, rightwingers have delighted in the apology and its potential to harm the band’s credibility, another confirmation of reactionary benevolence and generosity.
In fact, the media frenzy has helped bolster the band in the short term. Kneecap’s Spotify reach has exploded, for lack of a better word, since their Coachella performance and the collective hissy fit it inspired.
Who can legitimately claim the title of rebel in all of this is very much a part of the story. The right wants the power to decide what counts as legitimate rebellion because modern-day conservatives think they are the true rebels now.
Gallery of Mudslingers
The Kneecap saga recalls The Pogues facing a gallery of mudslingers for allegedly supporting the IRA in the 1980s.
The band saw their song "Birmingham Six" banned by the Independent Broadcasting Authority in 1988 because it referenced six Northern Irishmen wrongly convicted for the 1974 bombings of two pubs in that English city.
At the time, the band’s manager, Frank Murray, declared, “I’m glad to see we’re that important, that we’re a threat to the state.” Remember that this was the era when the voice of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams could not be broadcast on British TV or radio.
The Birmingham Six—as well as the Guildford Four, also referenced in the song—were later exonerated and released. It turned out that The Pogues had been right all along. Yet the ban remained in place for years.
Nevertheless, “Fairytale of New York” is probably the most beloved Christmas song in Britain today, and Shane McGowan is fondly remembered by many on both sides of the Irish Sea. So much for popular outrage about his politics.
That’s because the IRA is old news now. Many Millennials and Zoomers have no sense of what the Troubles were. Long gone are the days when Brits feared that a phone call from someone with an Irish accent meant that an explosion might be coming next.
This shift is confirmed by the fact that British tabloids haven’t even bothered trying to stir up outrage over Kneecap’s Irish nationalist rhetoric and regalia. Things would’ve been very different in 1985.
There have been many other episodes like this in the history of popular music. The Sex Pistols once caused a huge furore in the UK with “God Save The Queen”. Not that this has prevented John Lydon from starring in butter adverts.
Lydon himself called Kneecap “mediocre” and suggested they may need “a bloody good kneecapping”. But what more should we expect of an old punk rocker who now cheers for Donald Trump?
This type of scandal is not confined to Britain. The US has had many similar controversies, sometimes worse.
People forget how many people blamed the 1992 Los Angeles riots on the song “Cop Killer” by Body Count, a hard rock track often mistaken for rap because the band featured rapper Ice-T.
Conservative actor Charlton Heston and even Vice-President Dan Quayle joined the chorus of manufactured outrage.
Executives at Body Count’s label were bombarded with death threats. There was even talk of charging Ice-T with sedition. Eventually, the musician and actor decided to remove the song from the album and leave the label.
While the controversies surrounding The Pogues, The Sex Pistols, and Body Count stand out, there are a great many other examples of popular musicians being accused of crimes against the state.
In other words, Kneecap is in great company. Something tells me these lads might end up benefiting handsomely from the scandal.
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Photograph courtesy of Paul Hudson. Published under a Creative Commons license.