Afrasianet - Robin Anderson - American writer and professor at Fordham University - At  the famous Glastonbury Music Festival held every year in Somerset, England, rapper known as Bobby Phelan, bare-chested rapper Bobby Phelan, took to the stage on Saturday 28 June and made the audience chant with him: "Palestine is free, free."

He denounced the United Kingdom and the United States for their complicity in the genocide and expressed the hope that one day the Palestinian people would be liberated from the tyranny of the Israeli Government.

Then his tone changed, and he began to chant, "Death, death to the IDF," and the audience chanted with him. Then, as we say in English, everything exploded, and the uproar over what happened in Glastonbury dominated the news cycle.

The official statement issued by the Israeli embassy office in the United Kingdom described the chants as "inflammatory speech full of hatred" and considered them "normalization of extremist language and glorification of violence." From a government that seems immune to irony, the statement also claimed that Phelan's words represented a "call" to "ethnic cleansing."

The  BBC live-streamed the show, then expressed remorse, calling Phelan's chants "totally unacceptable" and saying they had "no place" on their waves.

UK police have opened a criminal investigation into Phelan's comments, as well as those of  Irish band Kneecap, and the U.S. State Department has revoked Phelan's visa, preventing him from giving scheduled performances in the United States later this year.

With the mainstream Western media preoccupied with this story, the ongoing genocide in Gaza was barely mentioned, and such language and reactions were virtually ignored.

Before the festival, social media images from Gaza showed incredible horrors; they were shocking and catastrophic. Children with medical bandages in place of amputated limbs, mothers, fathers and brothers crying, or carrying empty containers with their emaciated bodies in the hope of getting food. 

Hungry Palestinians seeking help were forced to cross the fire squares amid showers of bullets during the devastating scenes of once Gaza.

The final stages of ethnic cleansing were carried out at Israeli-controlled "aid distribution sites," with the help of a shadowy American "private" company — a mercenary militia.

British journalist Jonathan Cook explained what Israel planned in Gaza. The plan enabled the Israeli military to oversee or suggest the distribution of private contractors to distribute aid by grouping Palestinians into "centers" in the far south of the Gaza Strip, places that "in no way can accommodate everyone." These centers contained only "one-tenth of the amount of aid required."

There were no guarantees that Israel would not bomb those humanitarian centres or shoot starving Gazans forced to go there. As of 9 May 2025, 15 UN agencies had rejected Israel's plan, calling the aid "bait."

The new scheme was funded by Israel, through American contractors posing as a nonprofit called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

After the introduction of this model of "aid distribution," Palestinians became easy targets for the Israeli military, and Drop Site News  described them as being killed in "open killing fields."

Haaretz published an article accusing Israel of turning GHF  aid centers into "massacre sites," adding that they "work contrary to the humanitarian principles recognized by the United Nations and every organization that respects human rights."

 CounterPunch later described these sites as "execution squads, not aid sites," and Euro-Med  documented Israel targeting Palestinians as they approached these areas, and considered the GHF a partner in the "starvation machine."

Coverage of the mainstream American media has been much less intense. He described a lengthy New York Times report on the GHF as "controversial," saying in its introduction that it was "developed by Israelis as a way to undermine Hamas."

The report quoted a source as saying sarcastically: "Any food entering Gaza today is more than it entered yesterday." Other U.S. press coverage from southern Gaza has diminished Israel's responsibility or relieved the IDF entirely.

On 2 June, AP  reported that witnesses saw Israeli forces shoot "at" crowds at an aid site, covering the massacre by saying that "the IDF denied that its forces had fired on civilians near or inside the site in the southern city of Rafah."

A later headline in The Times came in passive form and linguistic manipulation that concealed what happened during the first "flour massacre" in March 2024, where it wrote: "Lethal aid reaches Gaza" and said that the Israeli army fired "near" food distribution sites.

Unlike The Times, Haaretz did not mitigate the fact, reporting "It's a killing field: IDF soldiers ordered to deliberately shoot at unarmed Gazans waiting for humanitarian aid." 

One soldier asserted that the aid seekers were "treated as a hostile force". He added that the army was using "live fire" of all kinds, including "heavy machine guns, grenade launchers and mortars", without "any case of counter-fire. There is no enemy, there are no weapons." Once again, the claim of targeting Hamas proved to be nothing more than propaganda to cover the bloodiest phase of a twenty-month genocide.

Human Rights Watch advised the international community to send an "international convoy" to stop the famine in Gaza, and the Center for Constitutional Rights reminded that the  GHF may be "legally responsible for aiding Israel's war crimes and genocide against Palestinians."

However, the Western media rarely suggests that the international community must stop this massacre, or that it has the ability to restrain Israel if it wants.

The topless rapper's lyrics were a response to an ongoing brutal genocide, committed with impunity, facilitated by traditional media, and silenced by those who dare to criticize it with threats of "anti-Semitism".

Despite the criminalization and repression of political opinion, the opposition continues to expand, reaching cultural spaces such as music performances.

As the Israeli army's brutality has escalated, killing without accountability has become emboldened for Israeli citizens as well. To understand Bobby Phelan's words in another context, let us also consider what Israelis chant, sing and post online, including members of the Israeli army who boast about destroying Palestinian villages.

Another post shows Israeli children chanting a song about "exterminating all the inhabitants of Gaza," and at the annual Jerusalem Day event celebrating the occupation in East Jerusalem, thousands of people chanted: "Death to Arabs," and then translated these chants into action, storming the Al-Aqsa Mosque and attacking an UNRWA installation.

The choice now seems between further suppressing freedom of expression, or stopping the annihilation of Israel, which clearly contributes to the reinforcement of genuine anti-Semitism around the world.

There are some indications that some British politicians are beginning to feel exhausted from supporting the Israeli genocide.

In an interview on BBC, British Minister Wes Street was asked to respond to the Israeli embassy's claims that the Glastonbury festival allowed "glorification of violence." "I say to the Israeli embassy: clean your house first," he replied, and then noted that "terrorist Israeli settlers" had carried out horrific acts of violence.

Sinn Fein MP Chris Hazard condemned Israel's bombing of the Bouquet café in Gaza, which journalists, activists and artists used to frequent, saying: "Western media will continue to shine the spotlight on Kneecap and Bobby Phelan.

Doesn't the lives of brave Palestinian journalists like Abu Sultan's statement mean anything?!"Despite the horrific attack on the café that killed more than 30 people and injured dozens, the front pages of the British media remained busy condemning Phelan's words, rather than the actions of the Israeli military.

With the British parliament voting a few days ago to ban Palestine Action, falsely describing it as a "terrorist organisation", Zahra Sultana, an independent MP for Coventry South, said the decision represented "an unprecedented serious transgression by the state".

I look forward to the day when the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom cease to support genocide and condemn atrocities committed by the Israeli army, rather than suppressing and criminalizing speech, solidarity and dissent.