Maybe it’s because I’m getting on in years, but I remember when being “progressive” meant supporting women’s rights, believing in gay liberation and opposing the persecution of ethnic groups. Yet now “progressives” are giddily cosying up with the fanboys of a foreign regime that ruthlessly represses women, hangs gays by the neck and funds proxy armies to rape and murder a certain ethnic group. Something’s gone wrong, hasn’t it?
Vylan is a man who fancies himself as hyper-progressive. He subscribes to every lazy orthodoxy of the dinner-party left
Just look at Bob Vylan. Fresh from titillating the silver-spoon genderfluids of Glastonbury with his hateful hollers of “Death, death to the IDF”, yesterday the warbling punk band’s frontman took to the stage at the Al Quds gathering in London. In front of a vast banner featuring the face of Ayatollah Khamenei – the late butcher of Tehran, the mass murderer of Iranian progressives – he delivered a speech on Palestine, railing against Israel and the “pigs” of the Metropolitan Police.
Draped in the mandatory keffiyeh of the turbo-smug left, he stood before a simmering mob of ayatollah cheerleaders and ranted about Israel’s “genocide” and Britain’s “complicity” in it. He got the crowd hot under the collar with that bigoted yelp he’s now famous for. “Death, death to the IDF”, he and the theocracy sympathisers chanted, polluting London with their vile calls of death for the soldiers of the Jewish state. Incredibly, Bob Vylan denies they or their chant are anti-semitic. Following the outrage over their Glastonbury performance, the duo said: “We are not for the death of Jews, Arabs or any other race or group of people. We are for the dismantling of a violent military machine”.
The band’s frontman is someone who fancies himself as hyper-progressive. He subscribes to every lazy orthodoxy of the dinner-party left. He loves Black Lives Matter. He hates Brexit. He thinks Israel is evil. He’s a booze-dodging vegan. He’s posted selfies where he’s smugly tucking into a tub of dairy-free ice-cream. And yet here he was mingling with supporters of one of the most regressive regimes on earth.
To speak in front of a loving propaganda pic of Ayatollah Khamenei would have been gross at any time. To do so mere weeks after the ayatollah’s brutish armies laid waste to thousands of innocent lives is sickening. What a foul betrayal of the true progressives of Iran. All they want is the same freedoms Bob Vylan enjoys – to dress how they please, speak how they see, go to gigs. And for that they have been mercilessly gunned down. Yet here’s this ‘progressive’ punk speaking not for the slaughtered dissidents, but rather in front of an image of the man who green-lit their slaughter.
The Al Quds gathering was a sea of bigotry. People cheered the murderous mullahs. They sang the praises of a regime that shoots women dead for wanting freedom. Some openly revelled in the idea of apocalyptic violence being inflicted on the world’s only Jewish nation. “Boom boom Tel Aviv”, placards said. There was a time when “progressives” would have steered well clear of such public displays of Islamist intolerance and sympathy for tyrants. Not Bob Vylan. He lapped up the cheers of the medieval mob. He inflamed their Israelophobic hysteria with chants about death for the young troops of the Jewish homeland.
The hypocrisy is rank. Bob Vylan raps about the sexism of British blokes. With barely concealed classism, he heaps lyrical scorn on Brits who make a “cheeky booking” to go “away to Spain” where they “pinch a cheeky bottom” and “shout at locals, ‘Oi you mug’”. Yet he’s content to rub shoulders with the British fanbase of a regime that harasses, jails and outright murders women if they dare to speak out of turn.
What an indictment of the luxury radicalism of Britain’s well-fed leftists. They wring their untoiled hands over sun-seeking British lads who love a pint, yet perform a speech for supporters of an Islamist regime that puts women to death for daring to demand equality. One minute they’re seeking virtue points by posing with a cup of overpriced hipster ice-cream, the next they’re speaking in front of a banner showing a man who thinks women are morally inferior to men and that homosexuals are the scum of the earth.
Vylan is not alone. The whole radical left is like this now. Since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October, they’ve been marching shoulder to shoulder with Islamists who dream of annihilating the Jewish state. These overeducated fools reach for the smelling salts when JK Rowling says “Men are not women”, yet shrug when a masked Islamist chants for the return of the Army of Muhammad to finish off the Jews. They’ve made a pact with the devil. They chant like lemmings for an “intifada” that would likely swallow up them and their gender-bending friends at some point.
The crazy thing is that the history of Iran itself shows how suicidally stupid it is for leftists to make an alliance with Islamists. After the Islamic Revolution, the mullahs repressed and even murdered the very socialists who helped them overthrow the Shah. Any progressive who hangs out with supporters of that theocratic regime is not only a hypocrite – he’s a halfwit.
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