Kanye West forced to stay West
Until last week, Kanye West was set to headline all three nights of Wireless festival this July, here in the UK.
It would have marked his return to the UK music scene after an eleven-year hiatus, since headlining at Glastonbury in 2015. Since then, he has dedicated years of his life to trying to incite his followers to hate Jews.
Kanye West has more followers than there are Jews on Earth, so his incitement has a huge impact.
It is disappointing that venues have been so quick to invite someone who was so recently peddling conspiracy theories, Hitler worship and bigoted lies – including one of the UK’s biggest festival stages.
His cycle of apology and relapse has become a routine, and we must wait to see if this time is any different. What is notable is that the latest apology came on the eve of the release of a new album, which his appearance at Wireless would promote. We have seen this pattern before.
If he remains on the right path and makes more effort to make amends, that is well and good, but if he returns to his old ways these venues would have had much to answer for.
The Prime Minister expressed his concern at the prospect of Wireless hosting someone whose anti-Jewish bigotry has gone as far as recording a track titled ‘Heil Hitler’ less than a year ago.
But, as we pointed out across media channels and newspapers, the Prime Minister is not a bystander.
The Government can ban anyone from entering the UK who is not a citizen and whose presence would “not be conducive to the public good”.
Surely this, we forcefully argued, is a clear case.
After all, Beatbox, Budweiser, Diageo, Paypal, Pepsi and Rockstar Energy all dropped Wireless over the invitation.
Wireless, though, refused to budge. Melvin Benn, the festival’s promoter, told us that he spent a gap year in Israel several decades ago and that he forgives Mr West. It was an insult to our intelligence.
Mr Benn, incidentally, is also the Director of Glastonbury Festival, which last year brought us Bob Vylan’s “Death death to the IDF” and “f***ing Zionists” and Kneecap.
This was about profit, not forgiveness. Nobody knows what might have come out of Mr West’s mouth on that stage or subsequently, least of all Mr Benn.
That is why we then said that if the appearances went ahead, we would organise a mass demonstration outside the festival, whose organisers should be ashamed of themselves.
Mr West offered to meet with the Jewish community. To that we said that he and Wireless had to choose: profit or principle. If Mr West were to cancel his appearances at Wireless, it would be a sign, we said, that he may be genuine in his remorse. If he did not, then a meeting with Jewish groups could in our view serve no purpose other than to kosher his invitation to the festival – which we would play no part in.
Kayne West is responsible for tracks with titles such as ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Gas chamber’. We want to see genuine signs of remorse from the man who last year said he made $40 million by selling swastika t-shirts via an ad he ran during the Super Bowl.
After our interviews across broadcast channels – including BBC, ITV, GB News, Sky News, Channel 4, LBC, Talk TV, Radio 5 and others – with news channels like the BBC using our talking points even when we weren’t on air, the Government announced that Kanye West would be barred from entering the UK.
The Government clearly made the right decision here. For once, when it said that antisemitism has no place in the UK, it backed up its words with action.
Someone who has boasted of making tens of millions of dollars from selling swastika t-shirts and who released a song called ‘Heil Hitler’ just months ago clearly would not be conducive to the public good in the UK.
Wireless Festival, in its desperate quest for profit, defended the invitation until the end. That is shameful. Then, with no headliner and multiple sponsors dropping out, Wireless felt it had no choice but to cancel the festival.
How did it come to this? Apparently “no concerns were highlighted” about Kanye West at the time of the booking. That’s what happens when the only stakeholders you consult are those who stand to make a profit.
It’s nice that Wireless suddenly began saying, “Antisemitism in all its forms is abhorrent,” when just a few hours earlier the festival promoter was saying that we all need to forgive Kanye for declaring himself a full-blown Nazi only recently.
There are plenty of musicians in the world who could have headlined this festival and brought delight to thousands of fans. Maybe next time organisers should look beyond Nuremberg to fill their roster.
Convictions for leaders of Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Stop The War Coalition
The Director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), Ben Jamal, and the Vice Chair of the Stop The War Coalition, Chris Nineham, have been convicted over their abuse of the right to protest, inciting their mob to breach police lines and conditions put in place to protect a synagogue.
They were facing charges of failing to comply with a condition that participants at a demonstration on 18th January 2025 remain on Whitehall in a static rally, after they had intended to lead a march as in other weeks.
The police were concerned about the prospective proximity to a synagogue and threats to the Jewish community – a tacit admission by the police that these regular hate marches are unsafe for Jewish people.
Following a trial at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, the two activists were convicted. Mr Jamal was also convicted of two counts of inciting other protesters to breach police conditions under the Public Order Act. He received an eighteen month conditional discharge, while Mr Nineham received a twelve month conditional discharge. Both were ordered to pay £7,500 in prosecution costs.
The hate march that these convictions relate to took place after a ceasefire had come into effect, but for these people there are no ceasefires in London, and after years of appeasement by our craven police chiefs, they were clearly unused to being told what to do.
The footage here was taken on the day of the march in question, after Mr Jamal and Mr Nineham had incited the crowds to breach police lines and conditions which had been put in place to protect a synagogue. Watch this and ask yourself whether this is a peaceful protest or a hate march. You might also ask why they only ever march on Saturdays.
The convicted criminals Ben Jamal and Chris Nineham have made Londoners’ lives a misery for years with their constant marches. They have changed nothing at all thousands of miles away in the Middle East. Instead they have disfigured our city centres into no-go zones for most ordinary people and especially for British Jews.
The fight for accountability is not over: it is high time that these opaquely-funded organisations are stopped from stretching the British right to protest into some kind of limitless right to monopolise public spaces week after week. The police and Government must follow through and end these incessant performative marches.
We will continue our work to see that they do.
Meanwhile, 523 people were arrested this past weekend for showing support for a proscribed organisation, namely Palestine Action. The age of those arrested ranges from 18 to 87.
Today, the so-called ‘Filton 6’ go on retrial at Woolwich Crown Court. At the recent trial, no guilty verdicts were returned, despite allegations of criminal activity at an Elbit Systems plant and an attack with a sledgehammer on a police officer. These are the first six of 24 activists to stand trial.
If legal work of this sort interests you, you might be the right candidate for our paralegal position. For more information, click here.
We will never forget the victims of the Holocaust – but what does Gen Z know about it?
On Yom HaShoah, we remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, the darkest period in history.
But how much do young Britons really know about the Holocaust?
We hit the streets to find out. Watch what happened here.
Hizballah is targeting Jews worldwide
The recent Michigan synagogue attack has been described by the FBI as a “Hizballah-inspired act of terrorism”.
Earlier this month Ayman Muhammad Ghazali rammed a vehicle into the Temple Israel synagogue – one of the largest in America – crashing into the building, where dozens of children were inside. In addition to the FBI’s findings, there are also reports that the suspect’s brother was a Hizballah commander, who was killed in an airstrike in Lebanon.
This new context underscores the very real threat of Iran-linked terrorism that is infiltrating the Western world, and as we have seen, Jewish communities everywhere are its targets.
It is not just in the West. In recent days, Hizballah has also been suspected in a plot to murder a rabbi in Syria.
Authorities there reportedly arrested a group suspected of plotting to assassinate Rabbi Michael Khoury in Damascus and planting an explosive device outside his home. The explosive device was successfully neutralised. The suspects are believed to be linked to Hizballah.
Hizballah is a puppet of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and seeks to murder Jews wherever it can find them.
It is therefore welcome that Labour MPs have recently been calling on the Government to commit to banning the IRGC in the upcoming King’s speech. The Government has promised to ban the IRGC, then backtracked, then pledged again and has since reversed itself once more.
This isn’t difficult, and it’s the least our country should be doing in view of the countless Iranian and Jewish murders that this terror group and its terrorist allies have committed.
Push the Government to take action by signing our petition at antisemitism.org/BanTheIRGC.
We have also urged Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, who has recently called out rhetoric by other Western leaders, to summon the Pakistani High Commissioner over horrendous incitement posted (and subsequently deleted) by Pakistan’s Defence Minister.
Pakistan has been hosting talks between Iran and the United States.
On the subject of allegedly Iranian-sponsored terror, last weekend Met officers at Westminster Magistrates’ Court arrested a nineteen-year-old man in connection with the Golders Green arson attack as he was attending the hearing of three other suspects in the incident and was recognised by police.
He was arrested for arson with intent to endanger life and taken into custody. Three other people have reportedly been charged in connection with the incident, and you can read more here.
We are grateful to the police for their ongoing investigation.
British reporting on Hizballah
There have been staggering claims by British journalists that Israel committed a war crime when it assassinated a so-called journalist who worked for an information agency which the US has designated a terrorist entity and which is owned by Hizballah. Hizballah is, of course, an antisemitic genocidal terrorist organisation proscribed in the UK.
Sky News’s Alex Crawford insisted that allegations that Ali Shoeib was connected to Hizballah were “baseless” – even as she reported on his funeral in which he was draped in a Hizballah flag.
Is this reporting or gaslighting?
The BBC’s John Simpson then hallucinated that “the Geneva Convention says it’s a war crime to target journalists, even if they work for an enemy organisation.” By that ridiculous logic, it was a war crime to execute Julius Streicher, the editor of the notorious Nazi organ, Der Stürmer.
What has become of the media in this country? Are they now so used to spewing terrorist propaganda themselves that they can no longer recognise the distinction between actual journalism and terrorism?
Scrutiny on local election candidates across parties
After recent rhetoric from the Liberal Democrat Mayor of Bath, Dr Bharat Pankhania, which led to his suspension from the Party, he has stepped down from his leadership role and resigned his membership.
This came as we also reported on Reform UK dropping a mayoral candidate after similar rhetoric about the ambulance attack in Golders Green.
Meanwhile, Gavin Callaghan, Labour leader of Basildon Council, has apologised for apparently posting an inflammatory video generated by AI about the Billericay Conservative Party as part of his local election campaign.
There have also been numerous allegations relating to Green Party candidates. Among them is Tope Olawoyin, who has reportedly withdrawn as a Green candidate in Havering after despicable comments about the Golders Green ambulance arson attack.
In Forest Hill, Green candidate Benard Mani has been dropped by the Party after video footage emerged from November 2023 of him allegedly tearing down balloons at a hostage display in Hove, in addition to other rhetoric.
Another Green Party candidate reportedly described Israel as “the biggest threat to the planet, because they are the chosen people”. In a video titled “true cause of the anti-semitic ambulance attack,” Mark Adderley, Green candidate for Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood, also appeared to blame Israel’s Prime Minister for the Golders Green arson attack, among other rhetoric. We have yet to hear what action, if any, the Party intends to take, and our analysis has been quoted in The Times.
New cases are arising every day. With our fragmented politics, more and more parties are major contenders in different parts of the country than ever before, so there are many plausible local election candidates. There will be plenty whose rhetoric crosses the line; the real question is whether or not their parties take action.
In our sports, schools and hospitals
It was great to see football clubs like Fulham, Liverpool and Tottenham wishing their Jewish supporters and the wider community a happy Pesach.
How dreadful that simple, positive posts like these can trigger so much antisemitic hate from social media users.
Antisemitism in our schools has too often been overlooked, with pupils and parents understandably reticent to come forward. So we are grateful to The Telegraph for publishing a number of cases that paint a picture of what Jewish schoolchildren are going through in modern Britain. You can read more here.
In healthcare, we have seen yet another regulatory failure after an NHS doctor was let off by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service after she was accused of posting antisemitic and grossly inflammatory social media comments around 7th October 2023. Our legal team is examining options, and you can read more about the case here.
Honouring the heroes
Yom HaShoah is not only about remembering the suffering that took place during the Holocaust, which was immeasurable.
It is also about honouring the heroism: the bravery of the Jewish people and righteous gentiles who stood up in the face of impossible odds.
That must be a reminder to us, in our own time, as well. The levels of antisemitism today are undoubtedly cause for despair – about the Jewish future, about Britain, about Western values and much besides.
But there are also victories in this fight that we should recognise. In the past week alone, a far-right rapper has been denied entry to the UK thanks to an intense pressure campaign, and two far-left activists have been convicted for their role in the hate marches.
In the midst of the despair, we will continue to fight, whatever the odds, for the rights and welfare of British Jews.
Our circumstances are not remotely comparable to those of the early 1940s – so we have no excuse not to stand up.
That is how we honour the victims – and the heroes.
