WHILE Kneecap are quite right to say “We are not the story. Genocide is”, there is a story to be told about who is trying to silence them. There is an all too familiar local aspect to this but also a growing international dimension, which will be the main focus of what follows. 
 
The local culture war against Kneecap is already years old and follows the well-worn path of calls for banning their appearances, defunding them and not treating their agitprop as good craic. From the debates at Westminster, it is clear that some politicians view the very name of Kneecap as offensive and a sick example of “glorifying terrorism”, something they seek to outlaw. The DUP were complaining about the band’s “Brits Out” chanting six years ago, although it is the TUV that is now leading the charge.

The band’s baseline ‘offence’ locally is – beyond the name itself – the promotion of the Irish language and their overt republicanism, objections to which most international audiences find incomprehensible. But Kneecap are no longer a local band. After tours of North America, Australia, continental Europe and Britain, and the release of their 2024 film, they have acquired an international following. What they now say and do is watched closely. 

Kneecap’s support for the rights of Palestinians has been there from the beginning. That support became more explicit and outspoken as the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza intensified. At California’s Coachella festival in April, Kneecap displayed giant messages including the factual statement, “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people” and is being “enabled” by the US. This was too much for the pro-Israel lobby and the moral and political panic about Kneecap went into overdrive.
 
Suddenly, Kneecap’s past performances and social media activity were under intense scrutiny and Mo Chara, aka Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, aka Liam Hannah, has been charged by London’s Metropolitan Police under the Terrorism Act 2000. The press reporting around this has said very little on how the Met got there. Most reports say “it emerged” that during a performance Mo Chara shouted, “The only good Tory is a dead Tory” (November 2023) and on another occasion (November 2024) was filmed with a Hezbollah flag that had been thrown on stage. It is this that the Met has used to charge Mo Chara. For more on the background to the case, listen to the latest episode (27 May) of the Free State podcast by Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning.

Such things don’t just “emerge” months or years later. Someone, or many people, have to go searching for them. There is certainly no evidence of any concert-goers being so shocked and offended that they reported Kneecap to the police at the time. So how did the footage come to light? Is the whole thing a set up as Joe Brolly suggests?
 
On C4 News (23 May) the Chief Executive of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, Gideon Falter, complained Kneecap’s antics were a form of incitement: they can get people “moving from a silent hatred into a hatred of action”. I don’t think he was referring to the death threats received by the hip hop trio, which are “severe” according to their manager Dan Lambert. 
 
CAA’s website carries five news items on Kneecap, the first of which (28 April) declares, “We have reported Kneecap to Counter Terrorism Police, which is now reviewing footage of the concert, and instructed our lawyers to prepare for a private prosecution if necessary”. CAA also wrote to a number of venues, including Glastonbury, to “demand” that Kneecap be removed from the line-up. It succeeded in the case of the Eden Sessions festival and Plymouth Pavilions. 

The CAA claims to have “led the media coverage and analysis of the Kneecap controversy as it relates to antisemitism”. Two years ago it was revealed that the organisation was given “almost half a million dollars by the UK partner of the Jewish National Fund, Israel’s quasi-governmental settler-colonial agency”. The CAA was behind claims that the British Labour Party was riddled with antisemitism under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

Lowkey on Double Down News argues that, across the Atlantic, “this campaign to cancel and arrest Kneecap is directed by the Israeli government” via the Creative Community For Peace which “coordinates directly with the Israeli Consulate in LA”. The CCFP is “one legal entity with Stand With Us” which is “handsomely funded by the Israeli prime minister’s office”. Before Kneecap’s appearance, the executive director of CCFP emailed the Coachella festival organisers to warn them that “the political provocateurs from West Belfast would bring their strident pro-Hezbollah and pro-Hamas messages to the festival stage,” but the show went on. 

Lowkey says that what the Met should be doing, instead of pursuing Mo Chara, is looking at the 80 or so British citizens serving in the Israeli military. There is prima facie evidence that ten of these have committed war crimes in Gaza, as detailed in a 240-page dossier presented to the Met by barrister Michael Mansfield.
 
There is a third organisation that has been implicated in the targeting of Kneecap – the “Mossad-trained” Community Security Trust, one of whose founders is personally close to Netanyahu. This is a large well-funded organisation that “protects British Jews from terrorism and antisemitism”. The CST claims it found the videos and reported them to the Met.

The above pile-on would have been less possible six years ago. This is because the political and military activities of Hezbollah (Lebanon) and Hamas (Gaza) were treated as belonging to separate entities when the British government first proscribed their military organisations in 2001. So to wave the yellow flag of Hezbollah, or the green flag of Hamas, would not have been seen as an act of terrorism under the Terrorism Act at that time. It was only in 2019 and 2021 that the political wings of Hezbollah and Hamas respectively were proscribed, thanks to Home Secretaries Sajid Javid and Priti Patel. Patel had been sacked as a minister by Theresa May for lying about the extent of her meetings with Israeli officials, but she was reinstated by Boris Johnson in 2019. 
 
A week after the total proscription of Hamas, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss signed a 10-year memorandum of understanding on trade and defence with Israel. Needless to say, there was nothing in the memorandum that references the illegally-occupied West Bank or any of the issues that matter to Palestinians. At least the EU’s Association Agreement with Israel (2000) included respect for human rights as a fundamental condition for its implementation, even if it was just window dressing, as discussed by Sinn Féin’s MEP Lynn Boylan and others here.

In April, lawyers acting for the political section of Hamas made an application to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper to have it removed from the list of proscribed organisations, of which there are 81 international groups and a further 14 groups relating to Ireland where we have a long history of legal restrictions on political rights and organisations. The Special Powers Act 1922 was often used to ban meetings, publications and political parties – Saor Éire (1931), Cumann Poblacta na hÉireann (1936), Sinn Féin (1956) after attracting 150,000 votes in a Westminster election, and Republican Clubs (1967), were all banned. The ban on Sinn Féin was only lifted in 1974 by the Wilson government, not long before the IRA truce of 1975 and negotiations with the British government. The Tories gave serious thought to banning Sinn Féin again in 1983 following the election of Gerry Adams as MP for West Belfast and the IRA bombing of Harrods in December of that year. 

The Special Powers Act – the envy of the apartheid regime in South Africa – allowed the Unionist government to do anything to preserve peace and maintain order. While the Terrorism Act 2000 is more limited in scope, it still contains a very broad definition of terrorism, so much so that it makes it “incredibly difficult to engage in a nuanced discussion about the merits of proscription without risking committing an offence”, according to the Hamas case submission.

One of the lawyers involved in the Hamas case is Franck Magennis from south Armagh, who was recently interviewed by Allison Morris for an event in Derry Playhouse organised by the Derry branch of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign. He also appears in a discussion for the Electronic Intifada (24 May) and, while some of us despair at Israel’s relentless bombing and starvation of Gaza, Franck is remarkably optimistic because “Israel is collapsing and Zionism … is in a terminal crisis”. This is worth 30 minutes of your time.

Mind how you go lads.