On Sunday night, as I was desperately trying to stay cool in the heat, draped over my sofa like a sweaty Victorian ghost, I noticed a familiar howl rising on X. A chorus of middle-aged men were once again demanding someone return their country to them. From Lee Anderson grunting about “decency,” to Matt Goodwin adding a new entry to his daily diary of moral decline, to Rupert Lowe appearing like a tugboat lost in 1953 and deeply angry about it, the energy was unmistakable.
Britain, somehow, had been misplaced.
Again.
And then I remembered – it was Glastonbury weekend. Of course.
Glasto does this to them every year. The drugs, the flags, the feminism – it’s like a sensory assault on everything they think made Britain great. For people who believe a Pride flag is Marxist propaganda and oat milk is a gateway drug to moral collapse, Glastonbury might as well be the Notting Hill Carnival of quinoa-fuelled sedition. And they absolutely cannot cope.
But this time, the meltdown wasn’t about a colourful flag or a slogan on a £20 tote bag. It was all aimed at a single moment: Bobby Vylan, mid-set at Glastonbury, chanting “Death to the IDF”.
Cue panic. Within minutes, right-wing commentators were foaming at the mouth. GB News had graphics ready before the set finished. Tory MPs demanded arrests.
It would almost be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.
Because this goes beyond a moment of provocation, and opens a conversation about how dissent is policed, how protest speech is often conflated with hate speech, and how those most devoted tend to support it only when the speaker is on their side.
I’m not asking you to love the comments by Vylan. I’m not even asking you to agree with it or be comfortable with it. But I am asking for all of us to be honest about what it was – and what it wasn’t.
The ‘false equivalence’ game
Let’s address the legal comparisons first, since they’re multiplying faster than conspiracy theories in a Reform UK WhatsApp group. The favourite one right now is Lucy Connolly – the woman arrested and charged after tweeting that migrant hotels should be “burned to the ground”. “If she was arrested for that,” they ask, “why hasn’t Bob Vylan been arrested?”
Now, I’m not a lawyer. But I can read, and I can reason. And it seems fairly clear that “burn down a migrant hotel” and “Death to the IDF” are not the same. One was a literal call for violence against a specific civilian group. The other is a chant directed at a military force currently under investigation for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. Connolly’s tweet was a location-based incitement. Bob Vylan’s was protest speech. You don’t have to like it. But if you can’t see the legal and moral difference, the confusion feels wilful.
On the other hand, the chant didn’t just provoke the usual suspects. Keir Starmer – a former human rights lawyer who does know the legal distinction between protest and incitement – condemned it as “appalling hate speech”. Glastonbury’s organisers said they were “appalled” and that the chants crossed a line.
These responses matter because they show this isn’t simply about right-wing pearl-clutching. Even people sympathetic to Palestinian suffering found the language troubling. That’s the nature of genuinely provocative protest – it makes everyone uncomfortable, including those who might agree with the underlying sentiment.
But here’s what is telling, the same crowd, at the same festival, chanted “Fuck Keir Starmer” – led by Irish rap group Kneecap. Equally offensive, if not as incendiary, language was directed at Britain’s Prime Minister. The BBC simply edited out the offending chants and put a clean version on iPlayer. No calls for arrests. No demands for investigations. No headlines about threats to national security. Just quiet editorial discretion.
For Bob Vylan? A national moral panic and demands for criminal charges.
The moral panic isn’t about offensive language. It’s about which targets are considered acceptable to offend. Protest that makes the right kind of people uncomfortable is suddenly dangerous. Meanwhile, politicians can call for the destruction of entire cities and it’s labelled “legitimate defence”. When Black punk artists chant a slogan about a military force, the response is swift and hysterical. Ban them from the BBC. Cancel their careers. Criminalise the outrage.
Outrage is rarely about the words themselves – it’s about who’s speaking, and who they’re speaking for.
Protest speech isn’t polite speech
I would add here that I know a thing or two about inflammatory chants. Having grown up in South Africa, I’ve heard protest speech that makes “Death to the IDF” sound like a vicar’s sigh. “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” – still chanted today – is rarely intended literally. “One settler, one bullet” rang out at Wits University protests. I didn’t sing it, but I understood it. This wasn’t calls for individual violence – it was angry metaphor against a system of settler colonialism.
Protest isn’t meant to be polite. It jolts, unsettles, provokes. It’s the language of the powerless confronting the powerful. Sometimes it sounds furious – because fury is what’s left when nothing else works.
Britain has thrown itself on the proverbial fainting sofa before. The suffragettes were branded terrorists, now they’re on banknotes. Anti-apartheid protesters were “extremists,” the 1926 General Strike was “Bolshevik,” striking miners were enemies of democracy. Even in pop culture, the Sex Pistols were banned by the BBC for “God Save the Queen” – now it’s considered a classic. The Jam were criticised for “Eton Rifles” as incitement to class warfare.
The people demanding Bob Vylan’s arrest would have called suffragettes terrorists and trade unionists traitors. They’re always on the wrong side of history.
That’s what Bob Vylan was doing – condemning a military institution involved in actions that have horrified much of the world. Whether you think the language crossed from protest into something darker is a fair question. Reasonable people can disagree about where that line sits. But the distinction between targeting a military force and inciting violence against civilians isn’t semantic – it’s fundamental to how we understand both protest and hate speech.
And none of this noise addresses what provoked the chant – 55,000 Palestinians killed, hospitals destroyed, populations displaced. These are inconvenient details that clutter the headline. Instead, we focus on tone, not context.
Which brings us to the Mail on Sunday’s fabrication.
When misquoting becomes defamation
This wasn’t sloppy reporting. It was something far more serious. The Mail took political protest and recast it as racial hatred, crossing the line from distortion into defamation. Turning critique into incitement isn’t journalism. It’s character assassination.
Bob Vylan said “Death to the IDF”. The Mail on Sunday printed “Death to Israelis” – in quotes, as direct attribution. Not paraphrasing. Not interpretation. Pure fabrication, designed to transform criticism of a military force into apparent genocide incitement. The distinction isn’t semantic – it’s the difference between legitimate protest and criminal hate speech.
Under UK defamation law, this could constitute serious harm to the duo, Bob Vylan’s, reputation. The false quote portrays them as calling for genocide rather than condemning military actions – a distinction that could destroy their careers, safety, and livelihood. When newspapers deliberately alter quotes to make them more inflammatory, they cross the line from editorial licence into potential libel.
The legal precedent here is crucial. If major newspapers can simply invent quotes, attribute them to public figures, and face no consequences, we’ve abandoned any pretence of press accountability. The Leveson Inquiry warned about exactly this kind of reckless disregard for accuracy, yet here we are – watching a Sunday paper manufacture hate speech out of protest speech with impunity.
This isn’t about protecting Bob Vylan specifically. It’s about whether journalism has any ethical boundaries left. If “Death to the IDF” can become “Death to Israelis” without consequence, what stops “End the occupation” becoming “Kill all settlers”? What prevents “Defund the police” becoming “Murder officers”?
The Mail on Sunday’s fabrication sets a dangerous precedent: that newspapers can rewrite reality to suit their narrative, confident that by the time corrections emerge, the damage is done. Unless there are real legal consequences for this kind of deliberate distortion, we’re not talking about press freedom – we’re talking about press lawlessness.
You can chant, just not that
Look, reasonable people can disagree about Bob Vylan’s chant. Maybe it crossed a line from protest into something darker. Maybe the language was too inflammatory, even for a punk stage. That’s a legitimate debate worth having.
But here’s what isn’t debatable: the same festival crowd that chanted “Death to the IDF” also chanted “Fuck Keir Starmer”. One triggered a national moral panic, demands for arrests, and calls to ban them from the BBC. The other barely registered. If this were really about offensive language or threats to public figures, both would have sparked equal outrage. They didn’t.
The real scandal isn’t the chant – it’s The Mail on Sunday’s deliberate fabrication. Turning “Death to the IDF” into “Death to Israelis” wasn’t sloppy journalism. It was character assassination designed to transform political protest into genocidal incitement. When major newspapers can simply invent quotes and attribute them to public figures without consequence, we’ve moved beyond press freedom into press lawlessness.
Bob Vylan will more than likely survive this manufactured controversy. The band’s career might even benefit – nothing sells records like moral panic from the right kind of people. But the precedent being set is more dangerous than any angry shout from a festival stage.
The message is clear: dissent is fine, as long as it comes from the right mouths, targets the right people, and stays within the right boundaries. Step outside those lines – especially if you’re young, Black, and angry about injustice – and watch how quickly “free speech” becomes “hate speech”.
Sometimes the most revealing thing about a society isn’t what it celebrates, but what it chooses to silence. And who gets to decide the difference.
This article is republished with kind permission of the Bear. Read the original here.
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