Kneecap’s Israelophobia has gone too far

The day after the Nova music festival massacre, the Irish band Kneecap posted a photo of themselves grinning from ear to ear alongside the words: ‘Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.’ The bodies of the 364 revellers butchered by Hamas were barely cold before these rappers from Belfast seemed to give smiley support to the militants who did it. ‘Palestinian struggle’, they called it, when what the rest of us saw was a straight-up pogrom in which Israeli youths were raped and murdered without mercy at a trance festival made into a slaughter zone.

Fast forward 18 months and Kneecap themselves are performing at a music festival in a desert. It’s Coachella in California, the annual get-together of America’s bourgeois white kids keen to splash some of daddy’s money on seeing their fave bands. Kneecap whipped the privileged attendees into a frenzy of faux virtue by getting them to chant ‘F**k Israel’.