The idea of going to Glastonbury has never really appealed to me. I’m sure it’s great fun if you like wet sleeping bags, overpriced veggie burgers, warm beer, chemical toilets and middle-aged women in sequins, but, oddly enough, I don’t.
But even if I were suddenly struck by an irrational urge to spend five nights in a tent, slowly soaking in my own juices, I don’t think I could stomach it. Not so much because of the hordes of selfie-taking influencers or New Age charlatans hawking their wares, but because it’s become incredibly political.
Let’s face it, these days Glastonbury isn’t really about the music (this year’s lineup was less than electrifying); it’s just an opportunity for left-wing bigots to get on stage and express their one-sided, half-baked opinions to an audience of adoring bigots too dreamy or too drunk to do anything but bleat their approval like a flock of lobotomized sheep.
Exhibit A: Damon Albarn, lead singer of the British pop band Blur, taking the stage and instructing the audience: ‘You have to show how you feel about Palestine. Are you pro-Palestine? Cheers and much waving of Palestinian flags are heard.
Truly, irony is dead. A rich, middle-aged white man tells a festival-going crowd to applaud a nation in whose name the military wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups carried out an attack on – wait for it – festival-goers in Israel (the Supernova festival in Re’im) in which attendees were kidnapped, raped and murdered in ways so barbaric as to be beyond imagination.
Damon Albarn, lead singer of British pop band Blur, took to the stage at Glastonbury and instructed the audience: “You have to show how you feel about Palestine.” Are you pro-Palestine?
A message of support for Palestinians and condemnation of Israel is projected on the Woodsies stage screen at Glastonbury Festival 2024
The girls were mutilated and desecrated, and the actions of their killers were gleefully documented on film and widely circulated on social media.
Who can forget the images of Shani Louk, her half-naked, mangled body paraded through the streets of Gaza in the back of a pickup truck, paramilitaries placing their boots on her, civilians spitting on her while chanting ‘Allahu? Akbar’?
Any one of the beautiful young women in the Glastonbury audience, with their sequin makeup and tattoos, could have been Shani. Any one of them could have been mercilessly hunted down, shot, gang-raped and set on fire, just as the festival-goers were.
And yet, who do they encourage? Who do they worship? Is it the memory of these fellow festival-goers, lives cut short in such brutal and unimaginable circumstances? No. It is Palestine, in whose name Hamas perpetrated these atrocities. Palestine, a state whose people elected Hamas as their political leader. Guys, seriously: what the hell is wrong with you?
I am not saying for a moment that Israel has not carried out its fair share of violence in this ungodly conflict, nor am I suggesting that the Palestinian people have not also suffered terribly, especially in the wake of these attacks.
But what happened on October 7 is a brutality all its own, comparable to what ISIS did to Yazidi women in Syria or what Boko Haram did to Nigerian schoolgirls just over a decade ago. And it happened to the same kind of people who are now enjoying a weekend full of fun and music at Worthy Farm.
Albarn’s failure to even acknowledge the victims is, in my view, an act of shameful cowardice. A man in his position, revered by so many, has a responsibility to use his influence wisely. Of course, there is a need to call for an end to the suffering in Gaza by all means, but there is no need to pretend, as he did, that there are no two sides to this conflict. There is no need to ignore the victims of 7 October for the simple reason that their fate does not fit your narrative or your political agenda. There is no need to mislead the public into cheap cheers. That is not only dishonest, but also dangerous.
But Albarn has form at this sort of thing. In 2010, Gorillaz – their spin-off band – became the first major British group to play in Damascus, Syria, which is of course ruled by President Bashir Al-Assad.
Syria, under Assad’s government, is a close ally of Iran and supports several groups carrying out attacks against Israel. At the time, Albarn described the event as “a wonderful experience.” That may not be everyone’s interpretation of a trip to one of the most anti-Semitic nations on the planet, but keep it up, Damon. Do what you want.
But there is something else here, a whiff of misogyny. Many of the victims of the Supernova festival were women, attacked with the oldest and most vile weapon of war, rape. Killing civilians is evil enough; raping them before doing so is an act of degradation designed to dehumanize the victim. Not to mention a war crime.
It is also an act of male violence towards women. Which brings me to Exhibit B: the other colossal cock-of-the-week, another rich, white, middle-aged, virtue-signalling man who likes to tell others what to think: David Tennant.
Accepting an award at the British LGBT Awards ceremony, she took the opportunity to launch a fierce attack on Kemi Badenoch, the women and equalities minister, over trans rights. She said she wished for a world where “Kemi Badenoch no longer existed”.
Backstage, he went further and said his message to trans youth was that “they are a small group of whiny little bastards who are on the wrong side of history and they will all be gone soon.”
This refers, of course, to what trans activists demonise as Terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) – that is, any woman who utters even the slightest squeal of concern about male-bodied individuals competing in women’s sports, or sharing locker rooms at schools, or serving time in women’s prisons, or having access to women-only spaces, or even just the way we, as biological women, are expected to refer to ourselves as ‘cis’ (a horrible, ugly word).
It takes a real misogynist to describe women concerned about the rights of other women as “little whiners”. I imagine something similar was said in the gentlemen’s clubs of Mayfair at the turn of the last century about the likes of Emmeline Pankhurst campaigning for women’s suffrage. Woman, know your place.
The truth is, whether in the name of war or in the name of awakening, it is always women who take the hits on the neck. It is our rights, our bodies, our dignity that are expendable.
That is the message Albarn is sending by failing to recognize the victims of October 7 while glorifying Israel’s enemies; That’s the message Tennant sends when he calls women like Badenoch little crybabies and wishes they would go away.
I don’t care what you call me, I’m not going to “disappear”. Neither is Badenoch, nor JK Rowling, nor Sharron Davies.
If this country elects a man on Thursday who has yet to express a clear opinion on whether women can have penises, we whiny little bastards will have our work cut out for us. It will take more than an arrogant, entitled man like Tennant to stop us.
