Kneecap terror charges – defend the right to protest against slaughter in Gaza

Oisin Duncan, Socialist Party Scotland Executive Committee

The Met Police have charged Liam Ó hAnnaidh, better known as Mo Chara, with terror offences after videos surfaced seeming to show him with a Hezbollah flag at a gig in London last November.

In their response on social media, the Kneecap trio correctly calls this a “festival of distraction” amid the potential starvation of 14,000 infants unfolding in Gaza. 

They also rightly criticise the highly undemocratic magistrates courts which will try Ó hAnnaidh and the political motivations behind this attack. 

Yet this is not about the flying of a Hezbollah flag by a rapper!  In Kneecap’s home country many flags associated with banned paramilitary groups are publicly displayed and often associated with local politicians, yet no charges are brought by the state. 

The real motivation here is to intimidate musicians, other artists and the working class at large into staying quiet about the unfolding genocide against the Palestinian people by the Netanyahu regime. It’s also part of the criminalisation by capitalist governments internationally of Palestinian rights protestors. 

Ruling class hypocrisy

The attempt to criminalise Kneecap by the British capitalist state follows the banning of the group from festivals and concerts in England and Germany, and a range of condemnations from Tory, DUP and Labour politicians. 

SNP First Minister John Swinney hypocritically called for Kneecap to be banned from Trnsmt music festival due to take place in Glasgow this summer. Aren’t the SNP supposed to be liberal and progressive? It was only last year that SNP politicians were exposed to have cosy secret chats with Israeli diplomats while publicly shedding tears about Gaza.

The trumped-up backlash is a clear reaction to Kneecap’s decision to speak out about Israeli state terror in Gaza and beyond at the Coachella festival recently. 

Following this, several videos have gone viral which feature controversial statements from the group, including an apparent call for violence against Tory MPs.

Some of Kneecap’s comments are crude expressions of anger, aimed both at the previous Tory government and the ongoing genocide against Palestinians, as well as Israeli state violence towards Lebanese workers and youth. 

While Marxists must understand and share the deep rage felt by the working class, our task is to channel those emotions into the class struggle, which includes defending democratic rights, free speech and artistic expression.

The hypocrisy of the same media and politicians which condemn Kneecap knows no limits

The double standards are obvious. Association with symbols of a proscribed group is grounds, it seems, for serious criminal charges, while Netanyahu and his cabinet commit crimes against humanity on a daily basis with impunity. 

Socialist Party Scotland and Young Socialists Scotland support Palestinian liberation and an end to Israel’s onslaught on Gaza and their attacks on Lebanon. We support the building of mass working class struggle by Palestinians as well as the working class and the poor across the Middle East for a socialist solution, including the creation of a viable Palestinian state. 

However, we do not support the methods and politics of Hamas and Hezbollah, who base themselves on reactionary, right-wing religious ideas. Hezbollah, for example, is backed by the reactionary Iranian regime who violently repress women’s rights, and arrest socialists, trade unionists and artists who are critical of the regime. 

Kneecap and controversy

This is not Kneecap’s first controversy; their mural on the Falls Road in West Belfast depicting a burning police van drew similar condemnations from politicians across the North of Ireland.

They recently collaborated with Young Spence, a fellow rapper from a working-class Protestant background on the Shankill Road.

The group also won a legal case against the previous Tory government after current Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch blocked a grant awarded to them due to their ‘anti-British’ political views. They donated the entire settlement of £14,250 to two youth centres in Belfast, one of which supports the Irish language and another predominantly used by young Protestants.

Not only was this an open attack on free speech by the Tories, but it also reflects the lack of public funding for working class artists, which must be campaigned for, and the pressure on them to ‘toe the line’ on political and social issues.

United working class struggle to overcome sectarian division is the tradition that Socialist Party Scotland defends. This includes in Ireland where our co-thinkers, now organised in Militant Left, have a long history of advocating the unity of Catholic and Protestant workers in a common struggle against capitalism, stare repression and sectarianism.

For example, in the 1990s we helped organise in the North of Ireland the successful Youth Against Sectarianism campaign, which included gigs and work with musicians.

Hip hop as music of the oppressed

As explained in a scene from their film released last year, Kneecap consider their music as an adaptation of black American rap music, and the infusion of the Irish language into that genre has created a popular sound which has attracted young people not just from Ireland but internationally.

However, and in line with the history of hip hop, some view their music as also embracing drug use, violence and sexuality in ways which undermine their more positive message. 

This in addition to their edgy humour has run them afoul of the right-wing elements of Irish republicanism. 

There’s a parallel here to the controversy over black rap groups in the early 1990s in the US, where groups like NWA and Public Enemy were censored and demonised for violent lyrics.

Conveniently for the ruling class, this process also drowned out the anti-establishment political ideas present in the rap genre, particularly the anger against poverty, police harassment, killings and oppression felt by black American workers.

Once again, quotes and actions taken out of context are used to undermine a deeper political message in Kneecap’s work. There are many examples of Kneecap lyrics which bluntly promote Irish republicanism in ways that we do not support, yet there are also counterexamples where they call for working-class unity, and of course more recently an end to the slaughter of Palestinians. 

Capitalism has always cracked down on art which points out the systemic exploitation it relies on, while the workers’ movement has a proud history of defending the right to free speech and artistic expression. 

There is an opportunity here not just to defend an Irish rapper from the British courts, but to mobilise a broader movement to oppose Israeli state terror and ultimately to oppose the capitalist world order which creates war and suffering. 

Kneecap should appeal to the Musicians’ Union and the wider trade union movement for support against the very serious charges they face that carry long jail sentences. The charges must be dropped immediately.