Bono's In Trouble Now, Kids! All Respect!!

    Rock stars. Ugh… Always making headlines. Always trying to broaden their intellectual horizons. Can’t they just shut up and sing?! I suppose not. And none more so than one of Irelands’s favorite sons. Yep…Bono’s catching a ton of shit…again. What’s he done now, you ask? Maybe foisted another U2 album on me and my fellow iPhone users? Donned his expensive shades for yet another narcissistic selfie with some president or pope? No, dear reader, it is far worse than that – he criticized the terrorist group, Hamas! Paul David Hewson (Bono’s real name)…Welcome to The Golf Room!!!

    Yes, the U2 frontman is catching all kinds of hell for calling Hamas ‘evil.’ It was in a statement issued this past week. After nearly two years of being harangued by the keffiyeh sub-humans who clog up the cultural establishment, all of them wailing, “When will U2 speak out about the genocide?”, the band finally buckled. But it wasn’t enough to calm the fury of the Israel haters. In fact it riled them up even more; because Bono made the fatal mistake of reminding people that an army of Jew-loathing cavemen started this war, and its name is Hamas.

    Under the interview title ‘On Gaza,’ all four band members offered their thoughts. It’s mostly whiny Boomer crap on the horribleness of war. But then there’s the Hamas slamming. It is a testament to the choking conformism of our neo-Nazi moment that it feels balls-out radical to see a rock band criticize that neo-fascist militia. Drummer Larry Mullen even opens his remarks with a furious dig at the “Hamas-led massacre of Israelis” when “innocent music fans were slaughtered, beaten and abused at the Nova music festival.” He goes on to rail against Israel, naturally because people of a certain mindset simply can’t help themselves, but my jaw stayed dropped. A modern rock musician mentioning the savagery of a terrorist group against Israel? Can it be? Be still my heart?

    However, it is Bono’s comment that is most striking. He lays into Israel, which is what the pitchfork-wavers wanted. But he lays into Hamas, as well. “The rape, murder and abduction of Israelis at the Nova music festival was evil,” he says. Let me repeat that for those of you on the West Coast. Bono used the word “evil” when describing Hamas. He DARES to humanize the Israeli youth of Nova. They were “music lovers and fans like us,” he says. It feels like sweet moral relief from the anti-Semitic damning of those innocent dancers in the desert as ‘settler-colonialists’ who had it coming. To think of those kids “hiding under a stage in Kibbutz Re’im’ is awful,” writes Bono. And then they were “butchered by Hamas,” he says, to “set a diabolical trap for Israel and to get a war going that might just redraw the map from “the river to the sea…a gamble Hamas’s leadership was willing to play with the lives of two million Palestinians.”

    Look, I’ve done my fair share of Bono-bashing in the past, both for his music (which at times I find boring and pretentious) and for the way he trots around the globe doing his best impersonation of Al Gore at the United Nations or taking selfies with any political leader he can find; or worse yet, acting like everyone's most annoying superbrat, Greta Thunberg. But I have to admit it; there is great moral clarity here that I did not expect. Bono recognizes that Hamas started this war, that it did so with the aim of erasing Israel, and that it has zero regard for the Palestinians sacrificed at the altar of its psychotic anti-Semitic dream. “Yahya Sinwar didn’t mind if he lost the battle or even the war if he could destroy Israel as a moral as well as an economic force,” said Bono. His terrorists “deliberately positioned themselves under civilian targets,” he continues, “having tunneled their way from school to mosque to hospital.” Why would a terror outfit behave so insanely? Check out its charter, says Bono. “It’s an evil read.”

    He then turns his guns on Benjamin Netanyahu, because, well, it’s part of his political DNA. Under his rule, what was “once an oasis of innovation and free-thinking” in the Middle East risks falling under the spell of “a fundamentalism as blunt as a machete.” Bono goes way, way over the top, accusing Netanyahu’s Israel of a “depravity and lawlessness” that “feels like uncharted territory.” If he thought such stinging words would placate the keffiyeh mob demanding he take the knee to their demented animus for Israel, he was mistaken. They’ve still found him guilty of the greatest sin in this era of Israelophobia: nuance.

    The backlash has been psychotically mad. Bono’s statement is “word soup,” says the Twittermob. It’s “billionaire pacifism.” He’s making excuses for Israel, the nitwits cry, having clearly been brainwashed by its “right to self-defense” craziness. Yes, how crazy to think the Jewish State should have the right to defend itself from an army of anti-Semites hell-bent on its obliteration. Some accuse U2 of “dripping in Israeli blood money,” because, of course, the only reason someone would slam Hamas and defend ‘Israel’s right to exist’ is because they’d been thrown a few shekels.

    Bono's home newspaper, The Irish Independent, wonders if Bono’s comments are “too little, too late.” It reports on the ‘furious’ response to his statement, including from academics in Dublin who say he’s giving too much “justification for Israel.” Some Irish singer named Mary Coughlan branded Bono’s statement “very, very weak [and] very, very measured.” Measured! That’s a bad thing? Music journalist Louise Bruton said Bono should have been braver, sooner, like Kneecap. Really?

    And there you have it. We must cheer the neo-Nazi hip-hop trio who celebrated the butchery of October 7, 2023 by posting a photo of themselves grinning like deranged sadists alongside the words ‘Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle’ on October 8th. And we must condemn the band that says Hamas is ‘evil.’ Bow down to the ski mask wearing neanderthals who yelp “Up Hamas” and rage against the old guard of Irish rock who rightly accuse Hamas of racist mass murder. Cozy up to neo-fascists and you’re a hero – criticize neo-fascists and you’re clearly a blood-moneyed billionaire who deserves public shaming.

    You couldn’t ask for better proof that popular culture has fallen under the spell not only of Israelophobia but of Islamo-fascism itself. The slavish conformism of the anti-Israel mania has blinded a certain swath of people to things that civilized society once held dear; balance, truth and basic moral decency. Bono’s true transgression is that he says he didn’t ‘speak out’ earlier because he felt “uncertainty in the face of obvious complexity.” Uncertainty? Complexity? These are verboten emotions under the rule of the keffiyeh mob. Only the most brutally reductive and fact-lite posturing is permitted. Israel is evil. Gaza is innocent. The End. Deviate from these cultish, if not childish, diktats forged more from bigotry than reality and you will be branded one of the Jews’ money-grubbing stooges.

    Hopefully, Bono now knows there is no appeasing the neo-religious fury of Israelophobia. Only obsequious prostration before their commandments of loathing for Israel will suffice. October 7th was designed to “sow the seeds for a global intifada,” Bono said in his statement. Indeed you are correct, Sir. Oh, and welcome to my world. Maybe you’ve finally “found what you’re looking for!” (Get it? U2! Pretty good, huh? You think he’s a reader?) The fruits of that global intifada can be seen in the fact that even an established rocker like you, Bono, now criticizes Jew-killers at your peril. Forget slamming Israel for likes, guys. It won’t work. Instead turn your ire on that very ‘global intifada’ that poses such a dire threat to Jews, liberty, the souls of our young, and even Western culture itself. Here endeth the lesson. 

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com