British police launch an investigation into shouts against the Israeli army at the Glastonbury festival.

The penultimate scandal of the Glastonbury festival, the largest outdoor music event in the world and a cultural and countercultural phenomenon with a fifty-year history, contains all the ingredients of a purely British mess, where tabloid press rushes to make noise, politicians are scandalized, gravity mixes with cynicism, and the official response is laced with a necessary dose of hypocrisy. The Avon and Somerset police department, responsible for anything that happens at the festival, has finally opened an investigation on Monday into the punk-rap group Bob Vylan for shouting from the stage on Saturday, “death, death to the IDF” (referring to the Israel Defense Forces, the official name of the army of that country), and the Irish rap group Kneecap, which performed simultaneously on the same stage and often displays Palestinian flags and slogans in favor of the terrorist group Hezbollah.

The police are reviewing footage of both performances, and for now, they are categorizing the investigation under an apparent public offense. They do not rule out that as the investigation progresses, the focus may shift to a possible hate crime.

The BBC did not broadcast Bob Vylan’s concert on any of its conventional channels but offered a live streaming on its digital platform, BBC iPlayer. In the case of Kneecap’s concert, not even that, although it later included a large unedited segment of the performance in its daily summary of the festival’s best moments published on the platform. The Israeli embassy in the UK quickly raised the alarm in a statement expressing its “deep disturbance at the incendiary hate rhetoric” that, according to them, had been expressed on stage, with slogans that “advocate for the dismantlement of the State of Israel.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose almost unconditional support for Israel and moderate condemnation of what happened in Gaza has irritated a large part of the Labour Party, was one of the first to harshly condemn what occurred at Glastonbury and demand explanations from the BBC. “There is no excuse for such scandalous hate speech. I previously stated that no one should provide a platform for Kneecap, and the same applies to any other artist who utters threats or incites violence,” the Prime Minister asserted in a statement.

The BBC held its own act of contrition and apologized for not cutting the broadcast immediately. Even the festival organizers expressed their dismay: “As a festival, we are against any form of war or terrorism. We will always believe in and campaign for hope, unity, peace, and love,” stated in her own statement Emily Eavis, one of the promoters of the event and a prominent British feminist.

Little Room for Surprise

The group Bob Vylan, whose two members prefer to keep their real names anonymous, are from London and have been performing an explosive mix of punk and rap with aggressively political discourse and provocative performances on stage for eight years.

Kneecap, the group from Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, with republican affinities, has long glorified the IRA and Hezbollah. Its main singer, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, whose stage name is Mo Chara (My Friend, in Irish), appeared on June 18 before a British court for displaying a Hezbollah flag at the London O2 stadium during a concert. Currently out on bail, he appeared on Saturday at Glastonbury as “a free man” and encouraged attendees to chant, “Fuck Keir Starmer.”

Given all these backgrounds, the reaction from the festival organizers and the BBC has ended up resembling that of Captain Louis Renault, the police prefect in the film Casablanca, who is shocked to find gambling in a venue and then demands his winnings. The proliferation of Palestinian flags at Glastonbury signaled what the communication between the audience and the stage would be like.

The response from Bob Vylan regarding the events has been a statement in video form claiming that “demanding an end to the slaughter of innocents will never be wrong. We ask Israeli civilians not to understand this rage as directed against them and not to allow their Government to convince them that a chant against the army is a chant against the people [of Israel].”

The group’s performance was witnessed live by tens of thousands of spectators, in addition to those who may have joined through the BBC’s streaming. Their notoriety has increased significantly in recent hours.

In 1976, journalist Bill Grundy interviewed the Sex Pistols on the BBC, who did not stop releasing obscenities throughout the program. It is estimated that between five and six million viewers watched. The public broadcaster decided to ban the broadcasting of songs like Anarchy in the UK or God Save the Queen. The British punk band became a universal and countercultural phenomenon that changed the musical trend of many other countries.