The most important artists in the country, Kneecap, have suffered a coordinated campaign by the footsoldiers of the Late Capitalist order. Their crime is their criticism of the Genocide. Note that this is literally a crime, as it is has been investigated by the security apparatus of the State currently occupying the part of Ireland they are from, resulting in a charge against Mo Chara, albeit under an inaccurate name that is the nearest the English State can come to being able to pronounce his actual name.

Micheál Martin—taoiseach or táiniste, whichever he is today, possibly they former, as Macdara can recall him squatting and grinning in the White House two months ago—called on Kneecap to “urgently clarify” whether they support Hamas or Hezbollah. What more absurd situation can be imagined? Does anyone think that they are sending food, water, money, ammunition to these groups, or volunteering their time on their behalf? If not, then in what sense could they possibly be supporting them in the way intended by the law? 

If any member of Kneecap did express any support for these groups, what they had in mind is the need to support any movement that actively opposes the zionazi occupation and genocide. There is no sense in which they support the actually existing movements of Hamas or Hezbollah, other than the crucial sense that these are the parties fighting the world’s most necessary struggle. We on the Left are often accused of being obsessed with purity, with cancelling people over small perceived differences. Here the lads made this huge act of generosity, refusing purism, and indicating support for the victims of genocide by naming their major policial movements. But the English State knowingly makes the most absurd category error, and counts this as being equivalent to material or materiel support, imagining perhaps that it must be an exact reflection of their own bloodthirsty support for zionism, which involves sending every possible weapon to the settlers, using the money they earn to maintain an aggressive regime of obedience and control in the English Kingdom (where it is hardly necessary to brainwash the people) and its Celtic Colonies (what will not be so easily fooled).

Let us note, as others have, that this shows a determination to prosecute speech that does not extend to the settler colonists’ festival of reaction every July, in which the English planters threaten all Irish people, including named Irish politicians, with torture and death.