There must be a cost

There’s a lot that could be said about Louis Theroux’s interview with Bobby Vylan, real name Pascal Robinson-Foster, on Theroux’s podcast. I even started to write a lengthy post detailing all the ways in which Theroux’s soft-soaping of Vylan differed from his usual probing, discomforting interview style. I looked up sources to explain why Theroux’s argument that “post-Holocaust Jewish exceptionalism” is to blame for the spread of ethno-nationalism in Hungary is historically illiterate; why Vylan’s association of white supremacy with Zionism is ignorant and foolish; and why both contribute to, and reflect, antisemitic ways of thinking that are all too common nowadays.

And then I stopped, because after Manchester, I am fed up continually turning to patient, rational explanation to try to tackle antisemitism. It’s demeaning, apart from anything else. It’s almost expected that this will be the Jewish response, but it shouldn’t need a 1,000 word Substack post to explain why calling for death is a problem.

There’s a part of the interview where Theroux and Vylan discuss the latter’s notorious “Death to the IDF” chant at Glastonbury, and they go back and forth about whether Vylan really meant death, or did he just mean that he wants the end to the IDF as an institution, but “End to the IDF” wouldn’t rhyme, and it’s just a figure of speech, and so on.

Except a month before Glastonbury, Vylan had called for “Death to every single IDF soldier out there”, at a concert at Alexandra Palace in London. In Amsterdam last month he told a concert audience ““F*ck the Zionists! Get out there and fight them! Get out there and meet them in the street. Get out there and let them know that you don’t stand by them.” And at another gig in Spain in August, Vylan said:

We do support the right to an armed resistance. ‘Cause we ain’t no f*cking pacifists. We ain’t the nonviolent type. Because we understand. We understand that in dealing with tyrannical f*cking governments, you need to be violent sometimes… We are for an armed resistance. We wanna make that explicitly f*cking clear.”

I don’t know why Theroux failed to ask Vylan about any of these other quotes. Perhaps he did, and it was edited out. Perhaps he’s lazy and didn’t do his research properly. Or maybe he didn’t bring it up because it would wreck the entire narrative that Vylan is a cuddly peacenik who has been misrepresented by the evil right wing press and Zionist white supremacists. Frankly, I don’t care what the reason is. All I know is that after Manchester, I have much less tolerance for this kind of nonsense.

Incidentally, Vylan didn’t correct Theroux on whether he wants to see Israeli soldiers killed, despite having said at that gig in Spain that he wants to be “explicitly f*cking clear” that he does support violence and armed resistance. So he’s a coward, on top of everything else.

It increasingly feels like this is part of the game. Antisemites, racists and Israel-haters say and do outrageous things that they would never say or do about any other country or people, and when Jews complain, we are gaslit repeatedly. Maccabi Tel Aviv fans are banned from Aston Villa because the police cannot guarantee their safety in the face of threatened protests, and when people point out the appalling implications of this, a narrative suddenly develops that the Maccabi fans are some kind of mega-hooligan firm from the 1970s. An antisemitic doctor rants incessantly about “Jewish supremacy” occupying the British government, and we are told she is just criticising Israel and opposing genocide. Bobby Vylan repeatedly and proudly calls for death and violence, and one of the British media’s best-known and most capable interviewers lays out the red carpet and helps to explain it all away.

And all the while, Jewish voices try to patiently explain the facts, as if facts are all these people are missing. As Jean-Paul Sartre famously warned: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, and open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly since he believes in words.”

Theroux’s podcast was recorded before the Manchester attack, which he acknowledges in the introduction. But they still went ahead and published it anyway, as if the death of two Jews due to an Israel-hating jihadist doesn’t change the context of an interview with someone who became famous for calling for death for Israelis. Theroux opens his questioning of Vylan with the classic motif of liberal white guilt, saying “I guess my starting point is… we’ve got very different life experiences, I’m conscious of all the privilege I’ve enjoyed”; but when it comes to the life experiences of the Jewish community, experiencing more religious hate crime per head than any other community in the UK, Theroux and Vylan breezily wave it away. It’s a form of privilege all of its own, the ability to be so dismissive of antisemitism and yet retain a sense of their own progressive righteousness.

I don’t think I’m alone in reaching the end of the road on giving people the benefit of the doubt over this kind of thing. I overheard someone say last week that it feels like people have had a free hit against the Jewish community for the past two years, and that has to change. I share that view, and there are, hopefully, some signs that things are shifting. The outcry against the Maccabi Tel Aviv ban went much further than I believe it would have done before Manchester. The antisemitic doctor has finally been arrested. As for Theroux: the most sickening part of the interview, sandwiched in between Vylan’s defence of “Death to the IDF” and Theroux’s offensive speculations about “post-Holocaust Jewish exceptionalism”, was the line “This episode is brought to you by British Airways.” Our national airline, sponsoring offensive garbage about Jews. Well, no longer. British Airways have pulled their sponsorship, of this episode of least.

It’s a start, but there needs to be much more. It’s a reminder that we can try to explain and educate about antisemitism all day long, but it will be meaningless and ineffective unless there is a cost: whether that cost is political, financial, professional or social. The days of the free hit must end.