RUTHFULLY YOURS

I’m glad the terror case against Kneecap has been thrown out. No one, not even tossers in tea cosies, not even crap rappers in Provo fancy dress, should be dragged to the dock for what they say. Yes, even if what they’ve said is ‘Up Hamas, up Hezbollah’. Freedom of speech must include the freedom to gush over neo-fascists. The liberty to utter is meaningless if it doesn’t cover the liberty of lowlifes to sing the praises of armies of anti-Semites. It’s gross, I know, but speech often is. Better that we trust ourselves to handle vile ideas than that we invite the state to infantilise us by reprimanding those we find offensive.

Here’s the main reason I’m happy the case collapsed: because now the court with real moral authority – the court of public opinion – can do its job. We don’t need wizened judges to tell us which ideas are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad’. We can decide for ourselves, through free, frank debate. And in the case of Kneecap, that’s exactly what we should do. The state’s case against them may have withered on a technicality, but the court of public opinion’s judgment upon these darlings of the Israelophobic bourgeoisie should be ferocious indeed.

It was band member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh (aka Mo Chara) who found himself in court. He was charged with expressing support for a proscribed terror group following the emergence of footage showing him holding up the Hezbollah flag at a gig in London in November 2024. Footage also showed the band hollering ‘Up Hamas, up Hezbollah!’ to the glee of the Israel-hating rich kids in their audience. Today, the chief magistrate at Woolwich Crown Court decreed that the charges against Mo Chara were ‘null’ because they were not brought within the statutory time limit.

Now that the state has finally butted out of this speech-related scandal, we the people can have our say. I’ll kick it off: what Kneecap said is even worse than you think. They didn’t just wave the Hezbollah flag, which would have been sickening enough given Hezbollah is an avowedly racist movement devoted to violently excising the ‘cancerous’ Jews from the Middle East and pushing them back to ‘Germany, or wherever they come from’. No, they also smiled – smiled – following the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.

For two years now, Kneecap have openly flirted with the ideologues of violent Israelophobia. On 8 October 2023, just hours after Hamas raped and butchered more than a thousand Jews in southern Israel, they posted a beaming pic of themselves on social media. ‘Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle’, they said, sporting wide grins and with a Palestine flag hanging in the background. As Jewish grandmothers were being dragged into dank tunnels in Gaza, as the blackened corpses of young Jews were being disentangled by early responders, Kneecap were smiling. They saw a pogrom and they said ‘Solidarity’.

They said ‘Up Hamas’ just a year after Hamas killed more Jews in one day than anyone else since the Nazis. They said ‘Up Hamas’ after it had been established that Hamas had thrown grenades at Jewish children, had beaten to death young Jewish women and had boasted to their families back in Gaza about how many Jews they had slaughtered with their own hands. They said ‘Up Hamas’, a movement founded with the express aim of exterminating Israel’s Jews, and which as recently as 2021 was inciting people to buy ‘five-shekel knives’ and ‘cut off the heads of Jews’.

One of the Kneecap trio – the one who’s nearly 40 – posed with a book consisting of the collected speeches of Hassan Nasrallah, the late leader of Hezbollah. This is a book that refers to Jews as the ‘descendants of apes and pigs’. It’s a book that celebrates the ‘tearing apart [of] the bodies of Jews’ via suicide bombings. It’s a profoundly racist tract. It dehumanises the Jewish people and gloats over the violent destruction of their lives. Imagine a pop star posting a pic of themselves getting cosy with a copy of Mein Kampf. Do you get it now?

I like to laugh at Kneecap. They fancy themselves as rebels when in truth they’re fawned over by every wing of the British establishment. They larp as edgy rule-breakers and yet the most bourgeois organ on Earth – the Guardian – can’t get enough of them. They imagine themselves as a cross between NWA and Padraic Pearse and yet their fanbase are pink-haired posh girls consumed by a curious loathing for the world’s only Jewish State. They’re scowling jesters to the court of received opinion. They’re the cultural elite’s in-house moral fluffers. They’re correct-think in a balaclava.

Yet I’ll tell you what isn’t funny — their Hamas flirting. We have heard so much bunkum today about the Kneecap case. It was an attempt to silence those who ‘speak out against the Israeli genocide in Gaza’, said Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill. Kneecap’s victory is a win for ‘everyone speaking out against Israel’s genocide’, said Owen Jones. What delusional self-flattery to depict criticism of Israel as a risky position when in truth you can’t swing a tote bag in polite society these days without hitting 10 cunts in keffiyehs clinking their glasses of merlot over their shared loathing for the world’s only Jewish State.

No, Mo Chara was in court not for hating Israel, the mandatory ideology of the leafy suburbs, but for allegedly praising a proscribed organisation. I don’t think he should have been in court at all, but can we at least be honest about why he was? Let’s cut the crap. Here’s my question for O’Neill, Jones and all the others gushing over brave Kneecap. If a band celebrated the murder of 1,200 black people by a white-supremacist army, would you defend them? If a rapper posed with a book that referred to black people as monkeys, would you cheer him on? If a pop act said ‘Up the KKK’, would you laud them? No more nonsense – just a simple yes or no, please.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy