Gaza’s Horror Goes Global: Israel Can’t Hide Behind Outrage Now

Right, so if hypocrisy were an Olympic sport, the pro Israel media, global political class and all the Zionist hangers on would be standing proudly on the podium, gold medals glinting under the sun, over all of their performative outrage, still raging on over the Glastonbury performance of Bob Vylan. While they clutched their pearls over a punk band chanting "Death to the IDF"—a direct critique of a military force accused of war crimes—the very organisation in question was busy turning Gaza into a graveyard. It’s the kind of moral gymnastics that would make even a contortionist wince. Because in this spectacle, it seems words on a stage are more scandalous than the victims of that organisation in a besieged strip of land.
So lets peel back the manufactured moral panic surrounding Bob Vylan’s performance and the faux outrage still on show and compare it with the raw and grisly reality of what the IDF is doing in Gaza and why what Bob Vylan is exactly what people needed to hear. It’s a shut up and listen moment followed by a call to action and more people need to heed the message instead of listening to the immorality and weaponisation of racism that is trying to drown that message out.
Right, so when Bob Vylan led a crowd at Glastonbury in chanting "Death to the IDF," a political thunderstorm erupted across not just British media and British government institutions, its gone global. A swathe of political commentators have rushed to denounce the performance as antisemitic incitement, with visa revocations from the US and investigations swiftly following apparently, if there isn’t a crime here yet, well we can make sure there soon is seems to be the attitude of the UK government these days. Yet, while this outrage has been playing out across headlines and parliamentary halls, up and down the country and around the world, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) were committing acts in Gaza so heinous they have drawn literal comparisons to The Hunger Games. So we need to look at this situation now because the uncomfortable but necessary question has to be raised here: why are words that condemn a military institution being treated as more offensive than the actions of that very military force?
Over the past several days, the IDF has intensified its campaign of collective punishment, indiscriminate killing, and destruction in Gaza. Just yesterday, a missile struck Al-Baqa café in Gaza City, killing at least 40 civilians, including children and the elderly and including several journalists, using this internet café as their means to upload their stories. That is just one of the most recent examples. The Israeli military has bombed shelters—256 of them to date—and has continued targeting tent cities where displaced Palestinians have sought refuge.
Israel has also expanded its northern Gaza ground offensive, with tanks ploughing through neighbourhoods and gunning down civilians in their path. These actions have transformed over 78% of Gaza into designated "danger zones" now, effectively rendering the majority of the Strip uninhabitable. Israeli evacuation orders are so expansive that humanitarian organisations now report 82% of the territory is under threat of forced displacement, leaving nowhere safe for Palestinians to go.
One widely condemned incident involved an Israeli sniper killing a man for carrying a sack of flour in the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood—an act that was anything but an isolated tragedy. Numerous other civilians have been gunned down while waiting in aid lines. In southern Gaza, at least four more aid-seekers have killed by Israeli forces, and in central Gaza, at least seven more lost their lives under similar circumstances. These victims were not combatants. They were starving, exhausted civilians trying to survive, turning up for aid where it will supposedly be given to them, only for death to be what awaited them.
Particularly alarming is the role of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), who run these sites now, an Israeli and US-backed initiative purportedly designed to distribute aid. Instead, it has become a deathtrap. Reports from Press TV and Quds News reveal that IDF soldiers have been ordered to shoot civilians queuing for food at these sites, killing more than 580 people since May 27, when the GHF took over aid distribution. The IDF even admitted to causing harm to civilians at these centres. The horror doesn’t end there. In a chilling revelation, the IDF was found to be digging pits and using sacks of sugar as bait to lure starving Gazans—then burying them alive when they fell in, to destroy evidence of their killings.
This campaign of extermination has drawn the ire of over 130 charities, who are calling for the immediate shutdown of GHF centres, deathtraps for the people of Gaza as they are. Yet Israel and the United States are actively working to block a UN plan to dismantle the GHF, clinging to a system that more closely resembles a weapon of war than a humanitarian lifeline. I think we should be more angry about all of this than something Bob Vylan said, but if you still need a few more reasons how about Al-Shifa Hospital, once Gaza's largest medical facility, has shut down its dialysis unit, condemning patients to certain death. Cancer patients, diabetics, and pregnant women are among those now considered expendable casualties by the logic of this siege. The Red Cross has sounded the alarm over escalating Israeli aggression, while fuel shortages and blocked supply lines ensure that medical infrastructure continues to collapse.
The deliberate destruction of critical infrastructure, coupled with restrictions on the entry of fuel and medical supplies, means hospitals are becoming places of death rather than sanctuary. The IDF has also resumed attacks on Al-Shifa Hospital and other medical centres, further undermining the already devastated health sector. These are not just violations of human rights—they are methods of warfare intended to make survival itself impossible. It is genocide. People are dying and others are more concerned about a rap duo demanding the organisation responsible for that be brought an end to? Give it a rest.
According to the Palestinian Prisoners Society, 73 detainees have died in Israeli prisons since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, many reportedly due to torture, medical neglect, or starvation. These are not random acts of violence but indicators of a systematic and coordinated campaign that clearly violates multiple articles of the Geneva Conventions.
The actions of the IDF align with several definitions of war crimes under international humanitarian law. Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court outlines war crimes to include "intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population" and "intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare." Both apply unequivocally here. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN have repeatedly accused Israel of violating international law, yet meaningful accountability remains absent as a result certainly of some people more outraged by by Bob bloody Vylan.
The targeting of aid distribution centres, the forced displacement of nearly the entire population, the attacks on medical infrastructure, and the burying of civilians in sugar-pits collectively form a picture of premeditated and industrialised extermination. And yet, the international community hesitates to act.
Bob Vylan’s chant of "Death to the IDF" was not a call for genocide nor an attack on Jewish people. It was a political expression against an institution engaged in systemic violence. As the artist clarified, "We are for the dismantling of a violent military machine… whose own soldiers were told to use ‘unnecessary lethal force’ against innocent civilians." This is a condemnation of militarism, not ethnicity.
It is absurd to suggest that a critique of a military organisation engaged in mass slaughter somehow equates to hatred of a people. Yet critics have labelled it antisemitic. This weaponisation of antisemitism accusations to silence criticism of the Israeli state and its military is a well-documented strategy. It deliberately conflates Jewish identity with the actions of the Israeli government and military, undermining both honest debate and the fight against real antisemitism.
While Bob Vylan is vilified, the IDF’s massacres receive comparatively scant attention. As Bob Vylan also said, they are the distraction. This discrepancy is not incidental—it is structural. Western media routinely adopts the framing language of the Israeli military: civilians are "collateral damage," strikes are "targeted," and every atrocity is justified by the ghost of Hamas. Meanwhile, protestors, artists, and athletes who call out Israeli violence are swiftly censored, deplatformed, or prosecuted.
This double standard reveals the deep rot at the heart of Western moral priorities, where a musician’s words cause more outrage than murder and horror in Gaza. Why? Because criticising a military ally is geopolitically inconvenient, while denouncing a politically marginal artist is safe and performative. It is easier to attack Bob Vylan than to confront the implications of funding a genocide. Of criticising an ally, Why are we still an ally of such depravity?
Given its record of systemic abuse, there is a legitimate case for dismantling the IDF. Founded on the militant and terrorist traditions of Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi—the organisations responsible for terrorist acts in the formation of the Israeli state that were combined to form the IDF itself—the IDF has always carried an ethos of settler-colonial expansion. Today, it operates not as a defensive force but as an occupying army enforcing apartheid and committing war crimes.
Every time an artist, activist, or public figure critiques the Israeli military, cries of antisemitism erupt. Yet those same voices are silent when Israeli politicians, settlers, or IDF supporters openly call for the slaughter of Palestinians. As Skwawkbox has documented, genocidal language from Israeli officials is routine. The selective outrage exposes the bad faith of those who claim to defend against hate but only do so when it serves their political alliances.
To claim Bob Vylan’s chant is a threat, but not the comments from Israeli officials urging mass killing of Palestinians, is to admit that the outrage is not about violence—it is about who gets to speak.
This dynamic reflects a broader trend of moral inversion. Musicians are punished, while generals receive arms deals. Bob Vylan’s chant becomes a national scandal, while a $510 million US weapons deal for Israel that has literally just been approved amid the Gaza genocide and concdemnation of Bob Vylan is treated as business as usual. Where Israel get half a billion dollars in more arms, Bob Vylan get their US visas cancelled.
The implications for free speech are dire. If even symbolic protest against military violence is condemned as hate speech, then the space for dissent is vanishing. Political art must be protected, right to protest must be protected especially when it confronts power.
What does justice look like? It begins with the International Criminal Court investigating Israeli commanders for war crimes. It includes sanctions on Israel and the cessation of arms sales. It demands that the US and UK governments stop shielding Israel from accountability.
It also demands cultural introspection. If we are more offended by a chant than by the destruction of an entire population, then our moral compass is broken. The discourse around Bob Vylan should not be a distraction from Gaza—it should be a gateway to talking about it more forcefully.
The real obscenity is not in the words shouted from a stage—it’s in the silence that greets the cries of dying civilians. Bob Vylan didn’t call for violence against a people; he called for the end of a military force complicit in crimes against humanity. And for that, he is denounced, while the IDF continues to kill with impunity.
Outrage at protest songs while ignoring war crimes is not moral—it’s political cowardice. It is not Bob Vylan who owes an apology. It is those who are still defending the indefensible.
For more on Bob Vylan, as well as fellow Glastonbury performers Kneecap, all in light of the proscription that may or may not be signed off on tomorrow against Palestine Action – again an example of protest being condemned more than the acts they are protesting against, check out this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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