Chants Are Not the Crime — Genocide Is
In recent months, Western leaders and media outlets have erupted in outrage — not at the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, not at the leveling of entire neighborhoods in Gaza, and not at the starvation used as a weapon of war — but at musicians daring to say “Free Palestine” or chant “Death to IDF” on stage. Bands have been canceled, statements denounced, tours threatened — all for daring to speak, to sing, or to rage in solidarity with a people being systematically destroyed. Yet the same voices condemning these artists remain conspicuously silent about the Israeli government’s unrelenting campaign of destruction in Palestine. Over the past two years, Israel’s war machine has inflicted a scale of violence that human rights organizations, legal scholars, and global observers increasingly describe as genocidal. Entire families erased. Hospitals bombed. Children killed by the thousands. But somehow, it is the artists who are seen as the problem. This grotesque inversion of priorit...