Wednesday, July 02, 2025
From Ian:
Brendan O'Neill: Karen Diamond: killed by ‘anti-Zionism’
Brendan O'Neill: Karen Diamond: killed by ‘anti-Zionism’
Soliman is reported to have yelled ‘Free Palestine’ as he set the Jews and their allies on fire. He said his desire was nothing less than to ‘kill all Zionist people’. It would appear that in his mind, the great crime of those who gathered in Boulder was to sympathise with the Jewish State. He seemed to view their weekly vigil for the Jews still held by Hamas as a Zionist outrage. These elderly folk had exposed themselves as ‘Zionist people’ and thus they had it coming. They deserved death. They deserved to feel the fire of his furious moral judgement.How Anti-Zionism Became a Western Rite
Here’s the thing, the truly chilling thing: Soliman is not alone in viewing ‘Zionist people’ as the lowest form of human life. His suspected actions in Boulder may have been extreme, but his literally burning contempt for ‘Zionists’ is entirely mainstream. It chimes with the fanatical loathing for the ‘Zionist entity’ that seethes and courses in influencer circles. It echoes the zealous and myopic hatred for the Jewish nation that is rampant among the woke. He gave murderous expression to the key belief of polite society: that Zionism is the great cancer of our times and we all have a duty to cut it out.
Liberal commentators damn Zionists as ‘depraved monsters’. They brand the ‘Zionist entity’ a ‘uniquely murderous’ nation. They call for Zionism to be dismantled, destroyed, so that humankind might finally be free of its noxious, bloodletting ways. ‘Zionism is a cancer to this planet’, their placards say. ‘Death to Zionism’, they chant. ‘End Zionism’, said scrawled, makeshift banners on those deranged Zio-hating protests that swept Ivy League campuses last year.
Zionism must be excised from the Middle East – ‘from the river to the sea’ – and its army must be destroyed, they cry, violently if necessary. Indeed, how striking that in the same week we learn that an elderly lady perished upon the flames of a man’s frothing hatred for Zionism, the left in the UK are defending that sick chant that rang out at Glastonbury: ‘Death, death to the IDF.’ They won’t say the name Karen Diamond because they’re too busy saying the name Bob Vylan, the punk-rap duo that whipped up that anti-Zionist mania at Glasto. Just think about this: they ignore a Jew who fell victim to the fascistic loathing for Israel because they’re too busy engaging in such fascistic loathing themselves.
This is not about blaming anyone other than Soliman for what happened in Boulder four weeks ago. It’s about examining, with frankness, the consequences of the latest elite hysteria. When you call Zionism ‘evil’ and its supporters ‘monsters’, when you depict Zionism as the wickedest ideology of all time, you have no right whatsoever to feign alarm when Zionists – Jews – are subjected to violent retribution. You found them guilty of evil, so why should others not pass sentence on them?
A huge majority of the world’s Jews identify with Israel. They are Zionists. So when the influencer classes demonise Zionists, and rob them of their humanity, and damn their nation as a cesspit of sin, and chant for the death of their soldiers, and dream of the coming violent erasure of their homeland, they are hanging a target sign on the neck of Jews. They are inviting, wittingly or otherwise, racial hatred and even worse for the people most likely to be Zionists: the Jewish people. There’s no more avoiding it: the elite derangement of ‘anti-Zionism’ is fostering a mob loathing for our Jewish compatriots. And challenging it is the great anti-racist cause of our time.
The scapegoating of Jews in the West is part and parcel of a rebarbarized culture, one that endorses political violence. A recent Rutgers University poll found that “55 percent of all self-identifying ‘liberals’ believe killing is a justifiable means of pursuing their political goals”—and endows it with theological significance. If George Floyd’s death and subsequent canonization as a secular martyr justified the urban riots during which 2,000 police officers were injured, thousands of businesses and properties were looted and vandalized, and 17 people were killed, the sanctification of cold-blooded murder soon followed. After Luigi Mangione allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024, images appeared of Mangione with a halo, in a green mantle with a red sacred heart, under the title “Saint Luigi, Patron Saint of Healthcare Access for All.”Gideon Falter: I am alive because my ancestors realised Jews were in danger. Britain is nearly there
These developments underscore the global convergence of militant political and religious movements. Islamists have learned to speak the language of social justice activists, while far-left radicals have learned to frame ideological struggle as a holy war. Human life holds little value for either of them. The journey from self-immolation for Palestine to so-called self-martyrdom bombings is a short stop or two on a train that long ago left the station of peaceful politics.
The ultimate aim of those who have married Islamism and Marxism, as Columbia University Apartheid Divest (a group of more than 100 anti-Israel organizations) admitted, is “the total eradication of Western civilization.” That would mean a world without political and economic liberty, freedom of speech and opinion, equal rights for women and minorities, technological advancement, philosophy, science, art, literature, music, and the blessings of the Jewish and Christian traditions.
The hatred of Israel and the Jews is at bottom a nihilistic loathing of the free and flourishing life that the West has secured for billions of people. Israel epitomizes not only the abundant fruits of Western civilization but also the conditions for their existence: strong borders, national pride, and free markets; thick social bonds and vigorous common purpose. These conditions are much maligned (particularly in the case of the Jewish state) because they impede any sort of political or religious globalization, be it of socialism, Islamism, or elite technocratic rule. While there’s no changing the minds of hard-core antisemites, Westerners who subject Israel and its people to withering criticism because they are inclined to support one or more of these causes would do well to ponder this biblical instruction: “Life and death I set before you, the blessing and the curse, and you shall choose life so that you may live, you and your seed” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
The reason that I am alive today is that, for my ancestors, there was a moment that they realised that their country was falling apart and becoming unsafe for Jews. For me, that moment came as I saw the footage from Glastonbury.
As Chief Executive of Campaign Against Antisemitism, I have had a front row seat as this country that sheltered my grandparents during the Second World War has become increasingly unrecognisable through hatred and extremism.
But Glastonbury was a pivotal moment for me, when some kind of ancestral sense was activated.
Tens of thousands of young humanitarians at the country’s premier music festival were chanting for “death”, in scenes reminiscent of mass rallies in Tehran or Sanaa, beamed into the homes of millions by the national broadcaster.
None of this should have come as a surprise. Bob Vylan has apparently engaged in this kind of behaviour before, and Glastonbury was already taking place under a cloud of controversy that it had courted by inviting soon-to-be-proscribed-as-terrorists Palestine Action to address the crowds and Kneecap to headline.
The Prime Minister had warned that the Kneecapper on trial for allegedly supporting terrorists “shouldn’t” be allowed to play, and the BBC – which had to pull a documentary after it emerged that a senior Hamas member’s family had been paid for assistance in its production – said it “probably” would not broadcast Kneecap’s performance.
But none of this prevented Bob Vylan’s rant about having to “work for Zionists”, chants for “death” and the obliteration of the entire Jewish state “from the River to the Sea” from appearing on screens in living rooms across the country, courtesy of the supposedly genteel and tolerant BBC.
Now of course, everyone is taken aback. Glastonbury’s managing dynasty, fronted by Emily Eavis, is “appalled” that the acts they chose so carefully behaved in this manner. The BBC says that the whole thing was “utterly unacceptable” and Ofcom is “very concerned”. Just another set of rapped knuckles and feigned surprise, but this is far bigger than that.
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