Bob Vylan: A Controversy

Let's conduct a thought experiment or two

Bobby Vylan, frontman of the musical duo Bob Vylan. (Image credit: Getty Images)

Every summer, or just about every summer, Brits celebrate music and culture at the Glastonbury Festival, which takes place in the grassy countryside of Pilton, Somerset, England. Hundreds of thousands of people attend each year. This year’s gathering, however, has been rocked by controversy.

Bobby Vylan, the frontman of Bob Vylan, a Black punk-rap rock duo in the UK,¹ blasted a phrase into his microphone at the festival this weekend — a performance which was covered live by the BBC. People are now openly positing that he may have committed a hate crime.

What was this phrase? “Death, death, to the IDF.”

(‘IDF’ stands for Israeli Defense Forces.)

Some people, on both sides of the pond, have claimed that this chant, which was echoed by the voluminous crowd, was antisemitic, arguing that it called for violence against Israelis.²

I’m here to dissect this phrase, in a way that some might consider what follows a semantic argument. While I will be examining meaning (which is the heart of semantics), I’m actually looking at the phrase sociologically. How is what Bob Vylan said socially situated?

The first thing I’d like to draw a parallel, one that might more readily strike home for those of us in the US.

Let’s say that someone got on stage at a local music festival in a major city — St. Louis, to pick a random example — and said something with a similar rhythm and rhyme scheme about ICE, the police-like entity currently subduing, assaulting, kidnapping, and abusing (physically and sexually) people in neighborhoods across the United States? What if that artist said that ICE should die?

I think many, if not most, readers here agree that ICE, the institution, should be abolished. Abolition is a form of death, bureaucratic death. That would mean that the group known as ICE, which gets its power via government backing, would come to a complete and utter close. It would expire.

There’s nothing inherently controversial about saying “abolish ICE,” because more than enough people can see that the institution has metamorphosed into a force that is tearing families and communities apart. It’s become an avatar of inhumanity.

If someone were to say “death to ICE,” most people would know that the person was talking about the institution, not the individual people who are currently working in it. It’s not a call for mass execution but rather for the group to be disbanded, never to reappear.

In fact, if someone said such a thing and then a bystander accused the first of calling for extermination, the first would probably look at the second and ask what he’s on about: “Why would you jump to that conclusion?”

It’s in this context that I view the Bob Vylan situation. Indeed, the band released a statement to that very point.

Another relevant example might be the fall of the Berlin Wall. East Germans were seen as enemies of the Western powers until 1989, when the Wall came down. Thereafter, officials moved to reunite the two regions, East and West Germany, into one entity. That meant abolishing many, if not all, of East Germany’s civil institutions, in particular the Stasi, the East German secret police. Did that mean killing all of those people? No, it meant getting rid of the group, because secret police are anathema to Western society.

The IDF is currently engaged in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. The group is doing such a combination of acts beyond the pale that, realistically, we don’t really have the language for it. Words can only hint at the scope and magnitude of these crimes. And while the IDF is doing this in broad daylight, not in secret, any group that commits such acts undermines not only Western values but civilization itself. It should be abolished. It should receive civic death and function no more.

And, of course, were the IDF to be dismantled, never to return, it would not entail the demise of the people in the IDF (though those who committed crimes should be charged and held accountable in a court of law). The exact same holds for ICE, were it to be disbanded — the people wouldn’t be taken out and shot. No one considers “abolish ICE” a call for slaughter. Yet this idea animates many Bob Vylan critics.

“We are not for the death of Jews, Arabs or any other race or group of people. We are for the dismantling of a violent military machine. A machine whose own soldiers were told to use ‘unnecessary lethal force’ against innocent civilians waiting for aid. A machine that has destroyed much of Gaza.”
— Bob Dylan, official statement

In terms of the accusation of incitement, at least one person, Wendy Joseph, a former judge, drew a parallel between Bobby Vylan’s chant and an incident that occurred last year during the racist, riotous unrest in the UK following child murders in Southport. People used Twitter to stoke anger at Muslims — who, incidentally, had nothing to do with the murders — and one woman in particular, Lucy Connolly, called for the burning of hotels that held asylum seekers in them. (People subsequently went to a Holiday Inn with intent to cause harm. Several were arrested.)

Talking to Channel 4 News, Joseph, comparing the two situations, said:

“The Court interpreted [Connelly’s] language as directly saying, ‘Go to people, go and burn down hotels.’ So if you look at the sentencing judge’s remarks, you will see he emphasized the volatility of what was going on in this country here and now. If it’s an incitement to violence — not against individuals but against an organization which is a lawful organization in another country — big question mark. What is our jurisdiction over it?”

I find it highly unlikely that the punk pair was inciting the Glastonbury crowd to find individuals of the IDF to assault. That stretches credulity to such an extent, it shreds. Are there many IDF stationed in the UK? Was there an immediate risk of the crowd taking Bobby Vylan’s words as commands and seeking to inflict such injury upon Israeli soldiers in the vicinity? Without immediacy, there is no incitement.

A Holiday Inn Express smoulders in Rotherham, Yorkshire, in the wake of the Southport riots as violence spread across the UK, August 4, 2024. (Image credit: Danny Lawson / Press Association / AP via CNN Newsource)

But let’s look at the charge that the chant was antisemitic. This charge fails, for one main reason: the group is a function of the Israeli government (i.e., the State), not of the people conscripted into it, and the State of Israel is not a person but a construct. Therefore, the charge of antisemitism necessarily is misapplied, because antisemitism is about persons, not constructs.

I’ve written about this before. The “new” antisemitism, in which criticisms about the State of Israel are taken to be prima facie antisemitic, rests in large part upon an unexamined idea of the State being perceived as, and equivalent to, a flesh-and-blood person.

[Many] consider antagonistic comments about Israel to be “the new antisemitism,” on the dubious concept of Israel being “a Jew among the nations” — that is, a nation-state personified as being an individual with a Jewish background. The unspoken line advanced here is that if someone makes a disparaging remark about Israel, then that person should be seen as doing the same to a Jewish person — and leveling that criticism solely on the basis of the individual’s Jewishness. It is by this legerdemain that all criticism of Israel becomes an ethnic attack.

“A Jew among the nations” brings to mind a solitary person, set apart, with perhaps much stronger forces arrayed against him. (Certainly, the idea of a lone, persecuted individual evokes pity, more so than the faceless structure of a state.)

This linguistic construction also reduces all of the people inside of the nation-state into one amorphous Jewish essence, an interesting sleight of hand considering that one-fifth of the citizenry claim something other than Jewish as their heritage. It follows, then, that this Bluesky post, where the author uses the diversity of the IDF to heap even more accusations of hatred, is ultimately nonsensical. The presence of Druze, Circassians and others in the IDF vitiates the original ‘antisemitism’ claim.

Bluesky post, June 30, 2025. (To be fair, it is difficult to tell if the author is employing deadpan sarcasm or is deadly serious.)

There is no real way to get to ‘anti-Israel sentiment = antisemitism’ unless you believe Israel — the nation-state — to be an effigy, a distillation of ethnicity.

What Bob Vylan said about the IDF should not be construed as antisemitism because the chant was about the institution of the IDF as an appendage of the State. The duo did not reference Jewish people (or Judaism) at all. It takes several leaps in associations and equivalences for a critic to arrive at the erroneous assumption that assailing a nation-state and extensions thereof is the same as harboring enmity and hatred toward a Jewish person based sheerly on that person’s ethnic (and/or religious) background.

In fact, it strikes me that this attempt to saddle Bob Vylan with hate speech charges requires a remarkable reverse application of the racist thought process, which I will explain now so that there’s no misunderstanding.

When a person engages in racism, they typically take the behavior they observe in one person, universalize said behavior, then extrapolate that trait as common among those in that person’s nominal group. This is an error of logic, one that most of us can readily see.

The reverse of this, in the instance of Bob Vylan, is that certain critics are taking the duo’s comments about a very particular group (the IDF), universalizing the targets of those comments (i.e., the IDF is mainly made up of Israelis), and then extrapolating the import of the comment (“death to the IDF”) to the entire population of Israelis.³

This sequence of first narrowing, then universalizing, and finally extrapolating mirrors the pseudologic that racists employ. However, in this case, the process is performed by third parties who project their determinations upon the supposed offender. This use of an intermediary obscures the embedded bias in this error: the prejudice actually emanates from the evaluators who employ this corrupted logic.

Now, I was unfamiliar with Bob Vylan until this brouhaha broke out. So I’m not defending them based on sentimentality or a sense of fan loyalty. I just know censorship when I see it.⁴ What Bobby Vylan (the frontman of the duo) said — was it provocative? Yes. I’m sure that was his intent. Was it controversial? Clearly — that’s why we’re here. Was it antisemitic? No, unless you’re one of these people that follows this convoluted line of reasoning:

Bob Vylan condemned the IDF → the IDF is the army of the State of Israel → Israel is advertised as “the Jewish state” → Israel claims to represent Jewish people around the world → Jewish people serve in the IDF → Therefore, condemning the IDF is condemning Jewish people as a whole

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As an addendum, Owen Jones, the British journalist (formerly of the Guardian and now affiliated with Zeteo), had an incisive analogy to bring to the table. He described the IDF as a genocidal army.⁵ He then likened condemnation of the IDF with similar condemnation that could have hypothetically been leveled in 1994, in a different region of the world:

“In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the Hutu militia, the Interahamwe, committed genocide against the Tutsi minority. If an artist during the genocide had chanted ‘Death to the Interahamwe,’ would that be interpreted as hatred of Hutus, or [as] an expression of emotional disgust at the genocide against Tutsis?

“What do you think?”

1. The second person in the duo is Bobbie Vylan.

2. In fact, one daily, the Mail, completely misquoted the phrase, stating that Bob Vylan chanted “Death to Israelis.”

Without question this is libelous. But possibly the editors felt they were simply bringing the subtext forward.

3. Furthermore, as most Israelis are Jewish, the band must be talking about Jewish Israelis in general. This extra step, as it were, is rather key, because without it the accusation of antisemitism would make no sense.

4. Some may quibble, saying this is not truly censorship, but it definitely qualifies as suppression by state actors. UK officials are said to be looking into whether hate crime laws were violated, and a chorus of commentators have said that the BBC should have censored the group (though the use of a time delay). As for the United States, the State Department revoked the visas of the two artists who were set to tour the US later this year.

5. As Jones points out, this claim has been substantiated by at least one world court, two major human rights organizations, and many scholars in the field of genocide studies.