“Palestine” Invades the U.K. by Rafael Medoff

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/383351/palestine-invades-the-u-k/

 A recent chance encounter in London’s Heathrow Airport offered a troubling glimpse of the extent to which anti-Israel hate is penetrating youth culture in the United Kingdom.

    The encounter in question was not with a person, but rather a newspaper—the latest issue of The Skinny. Distributed free to the more than 200,000 travelers who pass through Heathrow daily—and many others, elsewhere—The Skinny is the second largest magazine of culture and listings in the United Kingdom. Its format and radicalism—political as well as cultural—are reminiscent of The Village Voice.

    The anti-Israel trend in the UK music scene has been in the news in recent weeks. The rappers Kneecap and Bobby Vylan stirred controversy at England’s Glastonbury Festival by leading the crowd in chants of “Free Palestine” and “Death to the IDF.” The new issue of The Skinny makes clear that those ugly appeals for violence were far from isolated phenomena in the UK.

    The August edition features a two-page spread about “Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine,” which is billed as “a four-day mini-festival of theatre, dance, comedy, food, storytelling, music and poetry created by Palestinians.” The reviewer emphasizes that “each piece [of the festival] is unapologetically political” and promotes “Palestinian resistance” against “Zionist occupation and genocide.” The festival’s approach of “art as politics” is urgently needed “in a moment where international conversations on Palestine are policed, sanctioned, [and] sanitized by mainstream institutions,”  the reviewer asserts.