Kneecap’s “F*ck Israel, Free Palestine” stance and imagery at Coachella this weekend has earned both condemnation and outreach from one of America’s leading Jewish human rights organizations.
Three days after the confrontational Irish hip-hop trio took to the one of the high-profile festival’s stages in front of thousands and lambasted the Benjamin Netanyahu-led state over the war in Gaza, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has joined the chorus of denunciation over Kneecap’s actions. In part, the Wiesenthal Center wants to change the overall dynamic as well as show the overtly political group the errors of its ways and the insensitivity they displayed Sunday.
“At its best, music should bring people together and spread empathy, not hate,” Wiesenthal Center CEP Jim Berk said Monday. “It’s therefore remarkable that Kneecap used a music festival to foment hate, exactly the kind of gathering where, on October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists brutally murdered, raped, burned and kidnapped innocent young people at the Nova Music Festival in Israel.”
Giving the band a history lesson, Berk invited Kneecap and Coachella organizers to come to the Wiesenthal Center’s Roxbury Drive offices to discuss the toxic consequences of such attacks on Israel and the antisemitism it can breed. “We believe music and music-makers should be part of the solution and not the problem,” Berk said.
The subject of a Michael Fassbender co-starring Sundance debuting and British Independent Film Awards winning biopic 2024 drama, Kneecap have explicitly criticized Israel and PM Netanyahu’s response to the murderous rampage of Hamas many times over the past two years. Additionally, part of what occurred in Coachella’s Sonora tent on April 18 was in direct response to the festival cutting the band’s verbal blasts of Israel from the livestream of their April 11 performance on Weekend 1 of the gathering. To make sure it was “sorted” for this weekend, the Belfast-based Kneecap put their remarks up on the screens surrounding the stage.
Among the text that went up, were the F*ck Israel statement, and others such as “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people” and “It is being enabled by the U.S. government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes”
However, as puerile as the comments and imagery were, they had a limited range as Coachella organizers Goldenvoice opted for there to be no livestream from the Sonora tent this past weekend.
That didn’t dissway other bands at Coachella this year like headliner Green Day from making their own pro-Palestinian references in their sets the past two weekends.
Out of the over 1200 who were killed by Hamas brutal assault in October 2023, there were also over 250 Israelis and other nationalities taken hostage by the West Bank based terrorist group.
Though around 145 of the hostages have been returned in complex prison exchanges, the relentless pounding of Gaza by the IDF has been unable to rescue or even find many of them. Dozens of the hostages have already been declared dead as Hamas proposed a full release deal last week while refusing to give up arms simultaneously. As negotiations for a supposed ceasefire were going on, Hamas’ armed wing put out a video on April 15 that told Israelis and others their “children will return in black coffins with their bodies torn apart from shrapnel from your army.”