A Brave Band Takes a Brave Stand

    A little introduction, kids: So what does one do with a topic that is inherently close to one's heart, yet is buttressed with a sound or group that just doesn't fit with the person's zeitgeist (yes, I love that word)? That's the problem I find myself in right now as I try to type these words to you. I am, dear reader, in over my head with regard to the war in Israel. The Hamas/Palestinian cavemen that attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, seem to be floating in a sea of self-assuredness and global appreciation that should not be attached to a terrorist organization that, without provocation...yes, WITHOUT PROVOCATION... attacked and butchered and slaughtered and raped and disemboweled and raped and beheaded and slaughtered and raped, and murdered hundreds of Israeli citizens, etc., etc., etc. And yet, there seems to be a global hesitation to nuke these piece of shit human beings into their anti-intellectual, medieval belief in the afterlife. I know, I know...the nukes probably aren't the best way to handle a situation like this. But hey...I'm an opinion writer; not a deputy at our State Department. So instead, let me engage your mind with something that may be more to your liking...that's right...the musical group known as Radiohead! Now, full disclosure everyone. If the guys from Radiohead joined me on the first tee, I would have no idea who they were. I had to go on YouTube.com to get a sense of the their oeuvre, as it were. And to be honest, they are not my cup of tea. Songs like "Creep," "High and Dry," and "Karma Police," just didn't move me in any way. And that's fine. I respect the talent and the hard work. Who knows? Maybe they feel the same way when reading "From The Golf Room?" Idiot…

    But here’s the thing. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, bless his alt-rock soul, has had enough of the anti-Israel bigots. Towards the end of one of his solo sets in Melbourne, Australia not long ago, Yorke was heckled by a protester. “How many dead children will it take for you to condemn the genocide in Gaza?”, shouted the man, for the umpteenth time that evening. “Okay, you do it, see you later,” said Yorke, before walking off stage. Point made, he returned a few minutes later to perform his final song of the show. 

    This wasn’t Yorke’s first run-in with the ‘pro-Palestine’ set. Over the past decade, as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel has taken off, bourgeois leftists have turned on Yorke and his Radiohead bandmates for refusing to stop playing in Israel and collaborating with Israelis. For having the temerity, that is, to treat Israel as a country like any other.

    Matters first came to a head in the summer of 2017. Radiohead was due to conclude their ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’ tour in Tel Aviv. This prompted the BDS campaign, backed by veteran Israelophobes like film director Ken Loach and Pink Floyd's former front man Roger Waters, to call on Radiohead not to perform in Israel so as ‘to help pressure Israel to end its violation of basic rights and international law’. But Yorke refused to cave in to their demands. Instead, he told Rolling Stone magazine that he didn’t agree with boycotting, isolating and damning an entire people because of the perceived crimes of their government. As he later put it: “We don’t endorse [Benjamin] Netanyahu any more than [Donald] Trump, but we still play in America.” What’s more, he called out the ignorance of the BDS crowd, who just “throw the word ‘apartheid’ around” despite knowing nothing about the nature of Israel. It was a brave stand, given the intense conformism and allergy to dissent among today’s cultural elites.

    Since the start of the war in Gaza last year, the Israelophobia of the ‘progressive’ left has exploded. Yet, much to the chagrin of Western leftists, Yorke and his bandmates have maintained their principled objection to the BDS movement. Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, who is married to Arab Israeli visual artist Sharona Katan, played a gig in Tel Aviv this past summer with Dudu Tasa, an Iraqi Jew, before attending a protest the following day calling for the release of the hostages held by Hamas. For this, the BDS campaign accused him of ‘art-washing genocide’, but Greenwood stuck to his guns, arguing that there was nothing ‘progressive’ about ‘silencing Israeli artists’ purely for ‘being born Jewish in Israel’.

    It’s a neat summary of the unbridled bigotry of BDS. After all, this is a campaign driven by a disturbing desire to de-normalize and stigmatize an entire population – to present Israeli Jews as a tainted people, to be sanctioned, shunned and excommunicated. It’s a campaign that would be roundly condemned were it being levelled against any other nation.

    It might not look like much. But just by playing gigs in Israel and continuing to work with Israeli Jews...Yorke, Greenwood and the rest of Radiohead are delivering a righteous blow to BDS. Here’s hoping more musicians pluck up the same courage. Again, I don’t know much about Radiohead…but I love Radiohead. And you should, as well.

write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com