Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Glastonbury—and the Purge of the Jews
https://www.thefp.com/p/ayaan-hirsi-ali-glastonbury-and-the
The strategy is brilliant in its simplicity: Paint Israel as the nexus of evil. Then paint every Jew who doesn’t renounce it as complicit. Force them to choose: dignity or safety.
At first glance, and from the panoramic shot provided by a shaky iPhone, the scenes out of Glastonbury resemble an energetic protest. The red and green flags waving in the hot breeze; the keffiyehs; the chants. But turn up the volume and listen closely to what tens of thousands of people are shouting, led by the lead singer of the punk duo Bob Vylan: “Death, death to the IDF.”
This took place on one of the festival’s main stages. It was broadcast live on the BBC.
Lest there be any confusion about what the singer meant: Later that evening he posted a selfie eating ice cream: “While Zionists are crying on socials,” he wrote, “I’ve just had a late night (vegan) ice cream.”
Bob Vylan was followed on stage by Kneecap, an Irish rap trio named after the IRA punishment of shooting someone in the knee. They, too, are fond of sprinkling anti-Israel chants throughout their shows, and last month one member was charged with a terror offense after waving the flag of Hezbollah, a proscribed terror group, on stage. In video footage, members of the group can be heard shouting “up Hamas, up Hezbollah.”
The Bob Vylan incident was bad enough that papers across the world were forced to cover it. The New York Times, in framing that was typical, described their chants as “against Israel’s military.”
This is nonsense. Just as it is nonsense to hear chants of “Free Palestine” as being about Palestine any more than during the 1930s slogans about lebensraum were about a bigger backyard.
What happened at Glastonbury over the weekend is part of a coordinated, ideological insurgency against the Jewish people. Not just against the Israeli military. Not just against Israel. Not just against Zionism. Against Jews.
Jews are no strangers to accusations of secret plots: banking plots, media plots, world domination. They’re always scheming, according to the people who can’t stop obsessing over them. What’s unfolding now is a real plot not being orchestrated by Jews, but against them. And it’s happening in broad daylight.
While Jews are endlessly forced to disavow this, condemn that, prove their decency—the other side advances, unencumbered. No need for facts or logic. Just raw power and moral hysteria.
It’s called the “Free Palestine” movement. But the branding is a smokescreen. What we’re dealing with is not a grassroots plea for peace, for statehood. It’s Islamism soaked in Maoism, weaponized for the social media era, and sharpened to a point by ideological warriors who’ve read more Foucault than Quran.
Perhaps this will sound hyperbolic to you. But I have been researching and writing about subversive movements for decades, especially movements emanating from the world of political Islam.
What makes this moment uniquely dangerous is the merging of two ideologies that, historically, have operated in very different arenas: Islamism and Maoism.
The former is fueled by absolutist theocracy and tribal vengeance; the latter, by class war and ideological conformity. One invokes the divine; the other pretends to be secular. Both demand submission. Islamism seeks to restore a seventh-century caliphate through bombs, blood, and barbarity. Maoism seeks to flatten all hierarchies under the boot of “equity,” enforced through surveillance, humiliation, and fear. One dreams of paradise after death. The other promises utopia after sufficient political and social purges.
But both share a core instinct: Crush the infidel, purge the impure, seize control of the narrative. Islamism brings the fire—holy rage, a fixation on martyrdom, and a visceral hatred for Jews that predates the state of Israel by centuries. Maoism brings the strategy—the long march through institutions, the cultural struggle sessions, the rewriting of history, the reframing of reality through social media and sound bites.
When these ideologies converge—and they have—you get something far more dangerous than a political protest. You get a cultural movement. And this one has a clear mission: Erase not just Israel “from the river to the sea,” but the Jewish people from the moral map.
Maoist frameworks like “decolonization” and “privilege” provide the ideological cover—abstract enough to sound academic, blunt enough to justify destruction. Islamist fervor supplies the moral justification for violence—wrapped in the language of liberation, but aimed with surgical precision at Jewish identity. Together, they offer a single, horrifying message, one offered up by Twitch influencers and radical clerics alike. Zionism is evil. Jews are the oppressor. Therefore, they must be driven out of polite society.
The strategy is brilliant in its simplicity: Paint Israel as the nexus of evil, then paint every Jew who doesn’t loudly renounce it as complicit. Force them to choose between their dignity and their safety.
Look online—at X accounts like “Zionists in Music,” which are simply a digitized version of the kind of lists the Nazis drew up in their time. Consider what has already occurred in the music industry to shame, humiliate, and stigmatize Jews.
Look closely at the streets of America and Europe today—and especially our elite institutions. Jewish students are being harassed on campus. Synagogues, Jewish community centers, even kosher delis are defaced. A Jewish family dines out in Los Angeles or New York, and suddenly a stranger is in their face, phone camera rolling: “What are your thoughts on Palestine?”
This is not a protest, it is a predicate for violence. At best, these people are filmed and shamed online. At worst? Just look at what happened outside of the Jewish museum in D.C. Or in Boulder, Colorado, days later.
The scariest part is that there is no centralized command, no imam issuing decrees, no party chairman drawing strategy. It’s organic now. The algorithm is the accelerant. The more aggressive the footage, the more viral the cause. You don’t need a pulpit or a politburo—you just need a phone and a target.
One day it’s a video. The next, it’s a knife or a pistol or a Molotov cocktail hurled through a synagogue window—because the digital applause doesn’t just permit the violence, it practically demands it.
You can laugh it off as fringe, or imagine I’m being hysterical. But I am not. I grew up in the clutch of Islamism, and I know where it and its derivations lead. Wait until it’s your friend. Wait until the chants echo through your neighborhood. Until you realize that what once required a uniform, a manifesto, or a mosque now needs little more than a hashtag and a trending tab. That the machinery of radicalization no longer lives in caves or compounds—but on the piece of glass inside every one of our pockets.
I am not Jewish. I am Christian, which means that right now I do not have the immediate concern of my own children being harassed, or my house of worship being desecrated (in most parts of the West, as it happens). But I have no doubt that if this ideology spreads, they will come for us, too.
Don’t think it ends with Israel. Israel is just the pretext. The prize is broader. The Jewish people have always represented something larger: a people that refused to assimilate to their surrounding society, that carved an identity through ritual, law, memory, and resilience. In a world increasingly allergic to distinctions—between man and woman, citizen and foreigner, reality and fiction—that makes the Jew an existential threat to the new order.
And while Jews are endlessly forced to disavow this, condemn that, prove their decency—the other side advances, unencumbered. No need for facts or logic. Just raw power and moral hysteria.
So what do we do?
We name it. We expose it. And we snuff it out. That means rejecting the lie that the “Free Palestine” movement is a harmless expression of solidarity with oppressed people. It’s not. It is a political warfare operation run on Maoist principles and Islamist grievances.
We must stand with the Jewish community. Not quietly, not conditionally, but unequivocally. Because the alternative is absolute hell on Earth. Jews are once again being cornered, othered, and isolated. Not in the shadows, but in classrooms, boardrooms, and brunch tables—masked by politeness, cloaked in progress, and met with applause.
History doesn’t repeat. It evolves. The next pogrom won’t start with a storm trooper. It will start with a stare across the room, a whisper in the hallway, a question that isn’t really a question. It will start with a meme. “Never again” was never meant to be symbolic. It was a vow.
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