"Death! Death! To the IDF!"

If you’re in the habit of keeping up with current affairs in British politics, especially those affairs concerned with the bandying around of radical rhetoric from the safety of an elevated platform, or are interested in the underbelly of British independent music, you might have noticed a radical two-piece going by the name of Bob Vylan1 has risen to an unusual level of fame—especially considering their aesthetic creation and recreation centres around the natural meeting point of grime and punk rock. As I’m sure you’re well aware, my reader, the audience crossover for a band of this kind and for the self-indulgent musings of the author is practically a perfect circle. Their history is, presumably, as well-known to you as the broad strokes of S. K.’s life’s work; therefore, we will pass over it in silence.

However, there is an uncomfortable rumbling coming from the grime-punk scene with which I am oh so familiar: indeed, the shrill and indignant voices of respectability have invoked the irony of liberal modernity to propel this unusual two-piece into the popular discourse and make their at-first-witty-but-subsequently-annoying “punny” name a matter of reflective disorientation. It is, as the eye-catching title alludes, a call for violence against the Israeli Defence Force:

As noted above, the response to this “breaking through” moment, where a new force of personality breaks into the comfortable patterns of modernity and expresses something altogether impolite for the ongoing conversation, both pro and contra, has been unbearably shrill and twee. The reactionary-to-conservative crowd has set up in its indignity and pearl-clutching, identifying yet another radical act of antisemitism, this time more antisemitic than the last and less antisemitic than the next; the liberal-to-left crowd has set up in its indignity and pearl-clutching, identifying yet another figurehead onto which they can ascribe some level of virtue (whilst also dismissing the bourgeois notion of moral values, etc.)—leading to an altogether disappointing reaction to what is essentially an artist expressing a message.

As with all the over-educated and under-socialised, whether right or left, the possibility that the message could ever teach us something2 is little more than a trivial notion for an academic to broach in a paper published ten years into the future, to middling-to-satisfactory reviews from the five or six people who read it. No, my reader, there’s something