Kneecap make me ashamed to be Irish

Materially, what’s the difference between Kanye West gushing over Hitler and Kneecap saying ‘Up Hamas’? Both are instances of rappers praising Jew-killers, no? Kanye prefers the OG of murderous fascism, even going so far as to post a pic of Hitler next to the goat emoji – in short, Hitler was the Greatest of All Time. Kneecap, meanwhile, seem to have a thing for fascism with an Islamist twist. ‘Up Hamas!’, they cried at a London gig, just a year after Hamas carried out the worst act of anti-Semitic slaughter since the era of Kanye’s hero.

Kanye cuddles up to the man who oversaw the gravest crime of the 20th century, Kneecap big up the army of anti-Semites that carried out the worst act of violent racial hatred of the 21st century so far. Kanye admires the dictator who greenlit the industrialised burning of six million Jews, Kneecap admire the neo-fascist militia that laid waste to more than a thousand mostly Jewish lives on 7 October 2023. Two very different hip-hop acts united by a grim fascination with cunts who kill Jews.

But here’s the thing: where the woke left condemns Kanye, it praises Kneecap. It damns Kanye’s Hitler fandom as evidence of a disturbed mind, but it defends Kneecap’s open flirtations with the fascists of Hamas as a brave stand against ‘imperialism’. You couldn’t ask for better proof of how today’s fashionable hatred for Israel has fried the minds and ravaged the moral sensibilities of those who pose as progressive. That London’s bourgeois brats moshed in ecstasy as Kneecap praised the racist slayers of Israelis is the crisis of civilisation distilled.

Kneecap are a rapping trio from Belfast. They’re theatre kids cosplaying as Irish rebels. One is 35 years old and wears a tricolor balaclava. They rap about taking ket and hating ‘Brits’. This gets Shoreditch shitheads and other plummy pricks hot under the collar while driving the likes of the Daily Mail mad. And they really hate Israel. Of course they do. How else are you going to stay sweet with the Guardian and BAFTA and every other influential ponce in a keffiyeh other than by spouting the Israelophobia that is absolutely de rigueur in such circles?

Kneecap hit the headlines again this week following their set at Coachella, the music fest in the Californian desert beloved of rich white kids who mistake declaring their pronouns for having a personality. They whipped their fans into a frenzy of faux radicalism by getting them to chant ‘Fuck Israel’. There was not so much as a whisper of solidarity for the 378 youths butchered by a racist militia at another music festival in a desert just 18 months ago: the Nova festival. Well, they were only Israelis, and as Kneecap says: ‘Fuck Israel.’

There is something so pitiless about wealthy, mollycoddled kids in the US saying nothing about the youths of Nova who were just like them and who were slain for the ‘crime’ of being Jews. It is as profound a failure of humanity as I can recall. Instead, at the behest of feted rappers who parrot every bourgeois platitude from behind their ridiculous knitted balaclavas, they chanted ‘Fuck Israel’. Imagine being a survivor of the pogrom at Nova and seeing your fellow festivalgoers at Coachella behave like this – it boggles the mind.

Post-Coachella, people are discovering that Kneecap don’t just hate Israel – they also admire its fascistic enemies. The day after the 7 October pogrom, they posted an image of themselves grinning from ear to ear with the words: ‘Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.’ It was as gross as if someone had said ‘Solidarity with the German struggle’ after Kristallnacht. One of them, the twat in the tricolor balaclava, has posed with a copy of the collected speeches of Hassan Nasrallah, the late leader of Hezbollah who was a notorious anti-Semite. And they’ve previously got their audiences chanting ‘Ooh-ahh-Hezbollah!’.

Now it has come to light that at a London gig in November last year, they displayed the Hezbollah flag and yelled: ‘Up Hamas, up Hezbollah!’ The crowd roared its approval. This will have been an audience of mostly middle-class ‘progressives’ who fancy themselves as anti-fascist. Yet here they were cheering a militia founded to murder Jews (Hamas) and a movement that calls the Jewish presence in the Middle East a ‘cancerous growth’ that ‘must be destroyed’ (Hezbollah). Any Jew who survives our glorious destruction ‘can go back to Germany, or wherever they come from’, Hezbollah says.

This is what Kneecap is saying ‘Up’ to: terrorists who harbour the genocidal dream of expelling Jews from their homeland. Behold the newest subculture: anti-fascists for fascism. Music acts once ‘rocked against racism’ – now they rock for racist armies that rape and kill Jews. Kneecap’s flirting with the paraphernalia of Hamas and Hezbollah exposes the rotten heart of Israelophobia. It confirms that what poses as an anti-war movement is, in truth, an anti-civilisational movement – an alignment with Islamist hysterics born of a blasé feeling of detachment and contempt for one’s own society. ‘Fuck Israel’, they say, but what they mean is fuck the West, fuck everything, fuck you.

Kneecap have now been referred to counter-terror police regarding their chant of ‘Up Hamas, up Hezbollah’. This is wrong, profoundly so. The only people who will benefit from this authoritarian development are Kneecap themselves. I cannot explain to you how thrilled these Fisher-Price hoods will be at the news that ‘the Brits’ are investigating them. Finally, an element of danger has been injected into their bland project of phoney rebellion that is gushed over by every bore in the cultural establishment. The very serious problem of Western youths sympathising with barbarism cannot be solved with censure. Instead of making martyrs of Kneecap, we should let them carry on exposing the hatred that lies at the heart of anti-Israel animus.

Kneecap make me feel mortified to be Irish. They embody the tinny self-pity and voguish victimhood of Ireland’s cultural elites. ‘We sympathise with Palestine because we know what it’s like to suffer colonial oppression’, these people cry. They milk Ireland’s historic suffering to carve out a personality for themselves in the 21st century. They climb atop Ireland’s dead to advertise their virtue to the world. They marshall the ghosts of the Famine to the narcissistic end of boosting their own cultural power in contemporary debate. That might get rich girls in Coachella and Dalston squealing with delight, but it induces pure shame in all self-respecting Irish folk.

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 new 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