Jewish leaders in the UK were outraged this weekend following antisemitic chants led by performers at a major music festival, which was televised live by the British public broadcaster. The community has been raising concerns about the increasing number of hate crimes since the attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
Ahead of British rap-pop duo Bob Vylan’s Saturday performance, which included chants of “Death, death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces],” British Jews had already expressed that they feel unwelcome, criticizing the government’s lack of action against antisemitism.
“Bob Vylan’s chant didn’t come from an empty space,” David Collier, an independent investigative journalist, told Fox News Digital.
The event organizers were also criticized, with claims that Glastonbury Festival’s proclaimed values of “peace, unity, respect, and hope” seem insincere when their platform is used for promoting calls for violence.
“What happened at Glastonbury is a symptom of a sickness in British society,” said Nicole Lampert, a U.K.-based journalist and activist against antisemitism. “For me, and I say this with great sadness as a Brit and also as someone who spent many years as an entertainment journalist, this starts with the BBC.”
A boy, wearing a kippah, holds the British flag at a march against antisemitism after an increase in the U.K., during a temporary truce between the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and Israel, in London on Nov. 26, 2023. (REUTERS/Susannah Ireland)
Lampert said the BBC, which Britons pay for via their taxes, offers “very little nuance in the reporting” of the conflicts in the Middle East.
“There are meant to be rules in place which means that the BBC and its journalists are strictly neutral, but social media has shown that to be a lie,” she said, adding “every day on every Jewish group I’m on, someone is saying ‘I can’t stay here.’”
In a post on X, Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli urged British Jews to “leave the country.”
“The BBC has a long history of severe bias against Israel, but today a dark line was crossed by broadcasting calls for the murder of IDF soldiers,” he wrote, adding that “when such incitement is normalized, those who fail to act, those who do nothing to stop it, bear responsibility for the blood of Jews and Israelis living in Britain.”
Like the prime minister, the BBC belatedly released a statement saying it “should have pulled” the livestream of the performance and that Vylan’s performance contained “utterly unacceptable” and “antisemitic sentiments.”
“Millions of people tuned in to enjoy Glastonbury this weekend across the BBC’s output, but one performance within our live streams included comments that were deeply offensive,” the BBC said.
The British government did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital questions.
