Bono’s getting flak again. What’s he done now? Foisted another U2 album on iPhone users? Donned his expensive shades for yet another gurning selfie with some president or pope? Nope, it’s far worse than that – he criticised Hamas.
Yes, the U2 frontman is getting it in the neck for calling Hamas ‘evil’. It was in a statement issued at the start of this week. After nearly two years of being harangued by the keffiyeh knobs who clog up the cultural establishment, all of them wailing ‘When will U2 speak about the genocide?!’, the band buckled. But it wasn’t enough to satiate the fury of the Israel haters. In fact it riled them even more. For Bono made the fatal mistake of reminding folk that an army of Jew-loathing lunatics started this infernal war, and its name is Hamas.
Under the title ‘On Gaza’, all four band members offered their thoughts. It’s mostly typical Boomer fare on the horribleness of war. But then there’s the Hamas slamming. It is a testament to the choking conformism of our Israelophobic moment that it feels balls-out radical to see a rock act criticise that neo-fascist militia. Drummer Larry Mullen Jnr even opens his remarks with a furious dig at the ‘Hamas-led massacre of Israelis’ when ‘innocent music fans [were] slaughtered, beaten and abused at the Nova music festival’. He goes on to rail against Israel, natch, but my mouth was nonetheless agape: a musician mentioning the savagery at Nova? Can it be?
It is Bono’s comment that is most striking. He lays into Israel, which is what the pitchfork-wavers wanted. But he lays into Hamas, too. ‘The rape, murder and abduction of Israelis at the Nova music festival was evil’, he says. He dares to humanise the youth of Nova. They were ‘music lovers and fans like us’, he says. It feels like sweet moral relief from the anti-Semitic damning of those dancers in the desert as ‘settler-colonialists’ who had it coming. To think of those kids ‘hiding under a stage in Kibbutz Re’im’ is awful, writes Bono. And then they were ‘butchered’ by Hamas, he says, to ‘set a diabolical trap for Israel and to get a war going that might just redraw the map from “the river to the sea”… a gamble Hamas’s leadership were willing to play with the lives of two million Palestinians’.
I’ve done my fair share of Bono-bashing, but I’ll admit it: there is great moral clarity here. Bono recognises that Hamas started this war, that it did so with the aim of erasing Israel, and that it has zero regard for the Palestinians sacrificed at the altar of its psychotic anti-Semitic dream. ‘Yahya Sinwar didn’t mind if he lost the battle or even the war if he could destroy Israel as a moral as well as an economic force’, says Bono. His terrorists ‘deliberately positioned themselves under civilian targets’, he says, ‘having tunnelled their way from school to mosque to hospital’. Why would a terror outfit behave so insanely? Check out its charter, says Bono. ‘It’s an evil read.’
He then turns his guns on Benjamin Netanyahu. Under his rule, what was ‘once an oasis of innovation and free-thinking’ in the Middle East risks falling under the spell of ‘a fundamentalism as blunt as a machete’. He goes way over the top, accusing Netanyahu’s Israel of a ‘depravity and lawlessness’ that ‘feels like uncharted territory’. If he thought such stinging words would placate the keffiyeh mob demanding he take the knee to their demented animus for Israel, he was mistaken. They’ve still found him guilty of the greatest sin in the era of Israelophobia: nuance.
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Author: Ruth King
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