IF I tell you that I’m going to explain my feelings about Kneecap and Glastonbury by way of celebrity paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, you may raise an eyebrow, but try to stick with me and we’ll see how we get on.
Jeffrey Epstein owned an island and it was called Little Saint James, which sounds like it should be a couple of streets facing the bottom of the Whiterock, but it’s actually a sun-kissed Caribbean island in the US Virgin Islands where Epstein liked to bring his friends for the weekend. There they’d talk business; swim; drink; socialise; catch some sun; sail; rape children. That’s why Little Saint James is better known today as Paedo Island.
Jeffrey Epstein also owned a plane which he used to fly his friends to Paedo Island. It was a very nice Gulfstream G-550 and its log book is a who’s who of global celebrities who knocked each other out of the way to get on the jet but who today have no idea why the island was full of underage girls. The plane is now better known as the Lolita Express, after the 12-year-old girl featured in the Vladimir Nabokov novel.
PRINCE OF PAEDOS: None of Jeffrey Epstein child rape accomplices has been brought to book
Jeffrey Epstein also owned a seven-floor, 40-room mansion in Manhattan where he liked to hold what were called ‘sex parties’ back in the day, but are now called mass child rape. The mansion was filled with a wide range of sex-based ‘art pieces’, looping in an arc from smutty to pornographic. It contained a ‘dungeon’ chillingly described by one of the underage victims of Epstein and his many pals. That girl – Virginia Giuffre – recently took her own life.
I’ve taken just the four paragraphs to describe the utter depravity of Epstein and the circle of mostly older men in which he moved; there’s enough to fill four books. Epstein famously evaded justice when he took his own life (Ts&Cs apply) in the infamous Metropolitan Correction Centre in New York. It was a disappointment to those of us keen to see the sordid paedo ring taken down as of course a lot of important information died along with Epstein. Nevertheless, a huge body of evidence from the island, the plane and the mansion existed that would doubtless see the powerful and wealthy men in Epstein’s paedophile ring sent to jail for very, very long terms. Right?
Wrong. Only one person has ever been found guilty in a court of law for the decades-spanning rape of children. And that person was not a perverted old man, that person was a woman. Ghislaine Maxwell, an Epstein friend who helped procured children for him, was sentenced to 20 years in jail in 2022. She’s a thoroughly evil woman who’s where she deserves to be, but at the same time she’s also a mudguard preventing the rich and the male from ending up in a very different kind of of dungeon from the one they spent so much time in in Epstein’s New York home.
It’s just how things work. There’s a cynical old saying from the world of politics and business that goes ‘Deputy heads will roll’ and it pretty much sums up a society in which the rich and the powerful do occasionally pay for their crimes, but only if it’s to keep the very rich and the very powerful from paying for theirs.
Israel’s not paying for its crimes, and the IDF is not paying for its crimes. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be a fugitive from the International Criminal Court, but various Western powers have made it clear that if he wants to drop by the little matter of an international arrest warrent will not be held against him. Meanwhile, the ‘complex’ conflict between Israel and Hamas is forcing countries to take sides as the images from Gaza shock the world. And the UK has made its choice. Somebody has to pay for, something has to be done about:
• Hospitals being bombed.
• Babies’ corpses rotting in incubators.
• Medics being murdered and buried in a shallow grave.
• The rape of Palestinian detainees.
• The bloodcurdling genocidal rhetoric of the Tel Aviv regime.
• The flattening of Gaza.
• The starvation of an entire population.
And so on and so grimly, depressingly, horrifically on.
And the people who are going to pay for it, the people against whom something is being done are not the people responsible for some of the most sickening war crimes ever seen on this planet or the people arming and bankrolling them, the people who are going to pay for it are the people who are calling for it to stop.The people who are going to pay for it are a rap band from West Belfast and Derry and a black punk-grime duo from London.
Infuriating doesn’t begin to describe it, but from the bottomless pit of frustration and despair into which news like this sends those of us with an ounce of humanity a glimmer of light is seen up above. For the truth is that the mainstream media simply isn’t fit for purpose any more. It’s not match fit. Its anterior cruciate has never properly healed, it’s put two stone on and lost five yards. The people that the BBC teatime news and the Daily Mail need to reach are gone over the horizon and they’re never coming back. The legacy media, to give them their newish digital-age name, are still adept at upping the blood pressure of people over 50, but the polling and the statistics show that not only are they failing to move the dial when it comes to the young, the dial they’re using is steam-powered and the instruction booklet is in Latin.
Despite their gargantuan efforts, young Britain doesn’t like Israel. Young Europe doesn’t like Israel either. And if the polling is anything to go by, older Britain and older Europe is growing more and more pissed off with Israel with every passing day. Published in early June, a Eurotrack survey made the grimmest of reading for Israel’s famously well-funded and well-staffed Hasbara (communication/propaganda) operation. In the six countries polled, unfavourable views of Israel ranged in percentage from the mid-60s to the 70s. In favourability ratings, Israel is so far underwater its war cabinet meets in diving gear. In Germany, which we’ve been led to believe is incredibly supportive of Israel for historic reasons of guilt and shame, net favourability stands at -44. Let me just put that in letters in case you didn’t get it first time: Israel’s net favourability in Germany stands at minus forty-four. Its police may be beating the crap out of anyone wearing a melon badge and its politicians may be prostrating themselves embarrassingly before the most far-right government on the planet, but neither do so with the authority of the people. The UK has an even less favourable view of Israel (-46) and it’s further downhill after that with France on -48, Italy on -52, Denmark on -54 and Spain on -55.
That’s not only a problem for Israel, it’s an existential nightmare. The Western world order is built on a robust but at the same time oddly vulnerable system of interconnecting relationships. It is utterly dependent on the political dominance of the centre right, a collection of governments which to a politics student can seem diverse and antagonistic, spanning an arc that loops from the homophobic, sub-fascist snarl of Hungary's Viktor Orbán to the socially aware, sex-party-sauna smiles of the Scandinavians. In fact, they are all brutally regimented when it comes to the issues that ensure their longevity: the dominance of the ‘free market’; the normalisation of high-spending on the military; the alienation and targeting of political forces which emerge from outside the G7, EU and NATO tent.
Israel’s not part of that Western club, although it likes to think it is. It’s a tool of the West to be used when required, oiled, stored and maintained with money and goodwill that governments are happy to dole out as long as people don’t think about it too much. A majority in the West, or sometimes even a hefty minority, have for some 80 years thought either with mild positivity or passively about Israel, despite the bloodsoaked foundational crime that brought it into being, despite the regular explosions of racist violence which are needed to ensure its continuity. And they’ve thought that way because they see Israel playing France and Spain and Italy in the Euros; because they see it sing its heart out alongside the same countries in Eurovision; because the Israel story that Israel’s sponsors tell is one of Kumbaya kibbutzim, the Tel Aviv Pride parade, the oasis of Western values in the midst of the burning sands of Muslim hate.
That paper-thin pretence is gone and it’s not coming back. Those jawdropping unfavourability ratings may rally a little after the last loop of baby intestine has been picked from the Gaza telegraph wires, but they’re not returning anywhere near the level of goodwill – or even tolerance – required to keep a country in business. Why? Because there’s a reckoning coming when Gaza is finally opened not to the world, because it never will be while Israel exists, but to the world’s media, to human rights groups and to lawyers. Israel may spend eyewatering sums of its Western handouts on propaganda and PR, but all the promo films in the world, another thousand years of free trips to the beach and the Wailing Wall for politicians, journalists and influencers, will never erase the images that have been seared into people’s eyeballs.
But they’re having a go. Israel angrily invited us to join them in throwing their hands up in horror at Bob Vylan and Kneecap at the same time as they launched a missile into a busy seafront cafe in Gaza, with carnage of such an extent that the number of dead still hasn’t been counted. The BBC, the Times and the Mail invited us to share their disgust at anti-IDF chanting while they continued to display zero journalistic curiosity about the nature and extent of UK involvement in the Gaza slaughter. But the Bob Vylan/Kneecap charade has a shrinking audience. Three days in and it was running out of steam because it was missing the driving force of that large and growing chunk of the UK and US commentariat which has turned suddenly and ferociously against the Tel Aviv regime.
On Tuesday the Times letters page was replete with scathing critiques of the preposterous Glastonbury outrage; across television and radio, the narrative began to shift from ‘Ban these antisemites’ to an almost apologetic ‘Is this really worse than the beach café massacre?’
If Israel is running out of road in Europe, its hitherto smooth and free ride on the vast US freeway may be approaching a toll booth. Behemoths of the unhinged American far right have turned against Tel Aviv with a suddenness and an anger that has perplexed seasoned observers. Joe Rogan, Candace Owen, Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Green have all in recent months begun shrilly questioning their country’s hitherto unquestioning acceptance of Israel’s plucky little brother status. Today, more Americans disapprove of Israel than approve.
Donald Trump famously glazes over in the middle of briefings, but he sits bolt upright and pins his ears back when a Joe Rogan clip comes on his phone.
Hasbara that.
