British rap-punk duo Bob Vylan have reportedly been dropped by their agents following a controversial performance at Glastonbury Festival on June 28. During their set on the West Holts Stage, frontman Bobby Vylan led the crowd in chanting “Free, free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF.” The moment drew criticism and sparked widespread debate, with some defending the group’s political expression and others condemning the language as inflammatory.
“Free, free Palestine” is often chanted alongside the slogan “From the river to the sea,” both calls for the “liberation” of all “historic Palestine,” the name given the territory by the Roman Empire in an attempt to erase the Jewish homeland—punishment for Jewish resistance to Roman imperialism.
“Liberating Palestine” requires the dismantling of the State of Israel. This is what “Free, free Palestine” means. Since Israel is the homeland of the Jews, and has been for millennia, and since Arab nationalism is a colonizing ideology, there is no other way to interpret these slogans as genocidal.
The colonization of the Jewish homeland by Arab Muslims is a project to expand the Ummah, the global Muslim community, and establish Sharia (Islamic law) over the whole of the world. Islam is a totalitarian ideology.
We see this pattern of colonization not only in Israel, but across the Middle East and North Africa. Egypt used to be majority Christian. After the Arab-Muslim conquest of Egypt, Islam gradually became the dominant religion there through a combination of economic, political, and social pressures. Today, only 10–15 percent of Egypt’s population is Christian, marginalized and persecuted.
What has happened to the Middle East and North Africa is happing across the West. Muslims are colonizing Europe in massive numbers, establishing mosques everywhere, creating Muslim-exclusive enclaves, praying in the streets and on church grounds, even electing Muslims to positions of political power.
Muslim immigrants are Islamizing the cultures of the UK, France, Sweden, etc. And it’s happening in the United States, as well. New York City is home to the largest Muslim population in the US. Democrats there just nominated a Muslim to be mayor of the largest city in America.
It’s not just New York. Dearborn, Michigan, has one of the highest concentrations of Muslims in the country. Dearborn is home to the Islamic Center of America, one of the largest mosques in North America. The emotionally unstable Rashida Tlaib represents Dearborn Muslim community in the US House.
Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota has also become a center for Muslims. Ilhan Omar—who recently said that the US is worse than Somalia—represents the Muslim community there in the US House.
The origins of the phrases noted above represent Arab nationalism, Muslim imperialism, and Palestinian “resistance,” gaining prominence in the mid-twentieth century as Palestinian political groups articulated aspirations for hegemony over the entirety of the Jewish homeland. By the 1960s and 1970s, the slogan was used by organizations such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and later taken up by the genocidal death cult Hamas.
We see a lot of young Americans out in the streets chanting these slogans. This is the rot of postmodernism, a nihilistic doctrine they learned in college or from their college-aged friends or learned in Internet chat rooms. Like radical gender ideology, it’s a social contagion that preys on America’s mental health crisis and personality disorders freed from normative structuring.
I have critiqued postmodernism many times on here and on my platform. Let me just talk briefly here about one figure: French paraphilic philosopher Michel Foucault. You may know Foucault as a the “godfather of queer theory,” but he was also an Islamophile. He not only expressed sympathy for Muslims, particularly during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, but he embraced the rise of Islamism in Asia. He saw in their revolutionary fervor a powerful challenge to Western norms and secular modernity.
Foucault was intrigued by how the revolution mobilized what he regarded as deep cultural and spiritual forces to resist “Western authoritarianism” (i.e., democracy and liberty). Islam offered the world what Foucault called “political spirituality.” He saw the Islamic “uprising” as a disruption of dominant Western narratives about progress, order, and rationality.
As I have noted before, while Foucault did not explicitly identify as an anarchist, his core ideas resonate strongly with anarchist thought. This captured the imagination of Western youth. One of the reasons we see this bizarre affinity between the queer movement and Islamism is because of Foucault’s ideas regarding order and truth. The Red-Green alliance owes a lot to Foucault.
That’s right—our own academic institutions prepared younger generations to embrace the nihilism of postmodernist thought, which turned their corrupted minds against their families and their communities, and pointed them towards Islam and paraphilias. These are the young people you see cheering the election of Zohran Mamdani for candidate for New York City major (see The Problem with Zohran Mamdani). These are the misfits who comprise Antifa and BLM. And it’s all backed by transnational corporate power.
This is not a prediction. The struggle against Jihad is now. London has a Muslim mayor. New York is facing the very real possibility of a Muslim mayor. The barbarians are well inside the city walls. If the West continues allowing the Islamization of its cities and towns, the West will fall and our families will live under conditions of clerical fascism. Christopher Hitchens warned us about this more than 15 years ago. Resist while you can, he instructed us.
As for Israel, the Jewish state is the last outpost of reason in the Middle East. It’s imperative that the United States defend Israel’s existence. The struggle with Jihad is global.
freedom and reason 