A rapper says ‘death’. People in Gaza die. Guess what makes the news
Some, thank god, do see the obscene nature of what we are not seeing, nor being properly shown.
The Two Matts podcast and Guardian columnist Owen Jones have noted the disproportionate attention lavished on a rapper’s behaviour on a Glastonbury stage and the almost total invisibility afforded to the suffering people of Gaza. Not before time.
In Glastonbury, Pascal Robinson-Foster of the punk-rap duo Bob Vylan, led chants of “Death, death to the IDF” on Saturday, June 28, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. The show was livestreamed on the BBC and the story has dominated the British press ever since, forced a response from the prime minister and much of his cabinet and sent everyone into paroxysms of horror.
In Gaza, there is a very real prospect of a famine. And according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Israeli army officers have admitted they’ve been asked to shoot at Palestinians queuing for food. And yet, as the Two Matts say, the starvation facing hundreds of thousands of children is “relegated to an afterthought”. They ask, “Why does Keir Starmer say more about Bob Vylan than the humanitarian disaster on the eastern shore of the Med?”
Owen Jones writes: “How morally lost is a society in which a chant against a genocidal foreign army provokes a political and media firestorm, but the intentionally starved, unarmed human beings being mowed down on the orders of the IDF high command do not?”
Good question.
Fortunately, there are some who have at least asked it.
