Bob Vylan and the rise of ayatollah chic

We’ve all been there. You rock up to speak at a demonstration, intending to lend your voice to the oppressed and the downtrodden, only to realise you are surrounded by Islamists celebrating an anti-Semitic tyrant, who oppressed and butchered his own people. Welcome to the world of Bob Vylan, the punk-rapping affront to our eardrums and basic moral decency.

Bob Vylan frontman Bobby Vylan – real name Pascal Robinson-Foster – was one of the star speakers at the Al-Quds Day demonstration in London on Sunday. Because of course he was. What ‘progressive’ pin-up wouldn’t want to be seen at this despicable annual shindig with a well-earned reputation for descending into a carnival of Islamist apologism and open Jew hatred?

You’d think anyone with a truly anti-racist bone in their body would give Al-Quds Day a swerve. It all began in 1979, when the Islamic Republic of Iran’s freshly installed Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared the final Friday of Ramadan to be a day for Muslims worldwide to stand in ‘solidarity’ with the Palestinians. Unsurprisingly, the keenest supporters of the late Khomeini and the anti-Semitic terror state he founded have been taking it as an opportunity to air blood libels and support for Islamist terror groups ever since.

Don’t believe me? Sunday’s festivities in London were downgraded to a static protest after the Metropolitan Police requested the traditional full march be banned. This came after a memo circulated in the Home Office, warning that Al-Quds Day is a magnet for ‘racial hatred’, ‘anti-Semitic rhetoric’ and ‘open displays of support for proscribed groups’. Jeremy Corbyn, the world’s unluckiest anti-racist, was once snapped speaking from the platform in front of the flag of Hezbollah – the Jew-killing jihadi army set up in Lebanon by the Islamic Republic in the 1980s and banned under British law.

Despite its diminished presence this year, the Al-Quds attendees made up for in vim what they lacked in plain old numbers. One was arrested for showing support for a proscribed group, another for dangerous driving, a third for threatening and abusive behaviour. spiked’s Brendan O’Neill was surrounded by a mob and had to be escorted away by police for his own safety, after he questioned a woman about her anti-Semitic placard.

Any pretence that this was all about the benighted people of Palestine was dropped this year, replaced by tear-drenched mourning for the recently despatched Ayatollah Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader, who was assassinated in the opening salvos of the US and Israel’s war with the Islamic Republic. One speaker – reportedly from the Islamic Human Rights Commission, a troll of a name given this organisation’s well-documented links to the brutal, rights-crushing mullahs – called Khamenei a ‘great martyr’. This is the same Khamenei who is believed to have killed as many as 30,000 of his own people this year because they dared to demand their freedom, and who threw money and resources at every anti-Semitic militia going.

Among all this was that prick Bobby, addressing the crowd in front of a banner depicting Khamenei and claiming this murderous theocrat was on ‘the right side of history’. Bobby finished his speech with a reprisal of his favourite chant, ‘Death, death to the IDF’. It was this blood-curdling cry to kill the soldiers of the Jewish State – the army almost all Israelis are required to serve in, charged with protecting Jews from the genocidal, Tehran-backed forces on Israel’s borders – that first sealed Bob Vylan’s infamy when they debuted it to thousands during their Glastonbury set last summer. (Avon and Somerset Police eventually concluded the chant didn’t meet the criminal threshold. The Met are currently investigating Robinson-Foster once again.)

Bobby luxuriated in the Glasto backlash. He didn’t so much refute claims the chant was anti-Semitic as casually brush them off. He even told a credulous Louis Theroux on a podcast that the only reason he chose the word ‘death’ is because it rhymed with ‘IDF’. He was only speaking up for the innocents of Gaza, of course. Is anyone seriously still buying this? Here’s an idea: if you don’t want to be accused of being anti-Semitic and calling for the murder of Jews, maybe don’t address a demonstration glorifying an anti-Semite who commissioned the murder of Jews. It’s not hard.

The Bob Vylan debacle has shown the Israelophobes are truly beyond shaming. Or saving. They clearly get off on the notoriety, on the shudders they send through our already embattled Jewish communities, on the frisson of the Islamist company they now keep. It’s been tempting to call the ‘progressive’ wing of the ‘pro-Palestine’ movement useful idiots, marching in lockstep with 7th-century nostalgists who would happily hang them from a lamppost. But they clearly know exactly what they’re doing. They just don’t care. They are lost to this bigotry, to this cocky nihilism, to this barbarian chic.

I don’t want them censored, or locked up. It only fuels their grift. But I do want everyone to stop pretending that this is anything other than old poison in a new bottle.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.