I Hope Kneecap Stand Firm

Anybody else remember 'Delilah'? A massive hit for Welsh crooner Tom Jones in the late 1960s?

Harmless upbeat stuff, it might seem, written by two of the most successful mainstream songwriters of the day, Les Reed and Barry Mason. Been played 100,000 times since on daytime radio across the world, prompting scarcely a syllable of controversy.

The song is a celebration of murderous misogyny, expressing the sadness and sense of loss suffered by decent men driven to murder by discovering that a girlfriend has been having it off with somebody else.

“She stood there laughing/ I felt the knife in my hand/ And she laughed no more…Forgive me Delilah, I just couldn’t take any more.”

My memory is that the handful of people, mainly women of course, who voiced unease at the time were loudly told by almost everybody else to lighten up. Didn’t do Jones’s career one bit of harm, either.

Consider this in the context of Kneecap being put under professional and ideological siege for shouting “Up Hamas”, and “Up Hezbollah” so clearly you could almost hear what they were saying.

You have to wonder who spent hours scrolling through clips of Kneecap on stage in different parts of the world to find the bits of footage which we all have seen all over our television screens in recent days.

Kneecap at SSE Arena, Belfast, 21st of December 2024. Copyright David Sloan / hotpress.com

This is a not to suggest that nobody has the right to denounce Kneecap for their statements.

The Troubles bereaved have every right to say anything they want about killings by any side in Northern Ireland. Their truth outweighs all other considerations. This extends to the families of Jo Cox, murdered by a white supremacist in 2016, and of Sir David Amess, murdered by a British member of Islamic State in 2022.

It must extend also to the families of the 14 civil rights marchers murdered by men of the Parachute Regiment in Derry in 1972, the slaughter of 21 people by the IRA in Birmingham in 1974, the families of the ten men murdered by Provos at Kingsmill in 1976 for being Protestants, the scores of victims of the psychopathic sectarians of the UDA and UVF and the rest of the alphabet soup of loyalist savages, the New IRA killing of journalist Lyra McKee in the Creggan in Derry in 2019 and Marty O’Hagan shot by a Loyalist gang in Lurgan in 2001. We could go on and on.

There’s more than enough blame to go around in the North. We don’t need to add Kneecap to the list of miscreants. Kneecap have never killed anybody. Maybe that’s been their mistake.

There’s a mural in the Bogside celebrating Lyra’s killers. “Salute the men of violence,” reads the caption. There was a 30-band procession a couple of weeks ago through the Tyrone village of Moygashel, marking the anniversary of the death in 1975 of Wesley Somerville who blew himself up while planting the bomb which massacred the Miami Showband.

There isn’t a week goes by in the North without some event demanding recognition of the idealism and sacrifice of volunteers – men, and sometimes women, who took up arms to join in what they insist on calling a “war” in which it was not only legitimate but a duty to kill as many members of the “enemy” as could be caught in the crosshairs.

Hamas and Hezbollah are armed groups intent on driving Israel out of Palestine. They reflect the rage of Palestinians who have been caged and treated like animals by the occupying army.

We should keep this in mind when next we hear mainstream politicians and commentators chanting, “But what about October 7th?” The Palestinians have been suffering October 7ths week in and week out for decades. Well-regarded RTE and BBC journalists seem unable to understand the relevance of this.

They can’t be that stupid. Can they?

Kneecap are now being told they must make a more abject apology. I hope they don’t. That they ignore the cloth-eared, tone-deaf musical ignoramuses out to get them and so warn off any singer or band who dares stand up for the besieged Palestinian people.

This is about shutting up anyone who refuses to accept that Zionists must be facilitated in doing whatever they want to the indigenous people of Palestine and then cry foul when a random teenager retaliates by tossing a stone at them.

I hope Kneecap stands firm and that everybody who believes in justice and the integrity of art stands with them.

If Glastonbury cancels Kneecap other artists should pull out of the gig.