A tale of two chants: Why Starmer now casts even the British police as antisemitic

Starmer wanted punk band Bob Vylan prosecuted for chanting 'Death to the IDF!' Four months on, he's bullying the police to let Israeli football thugs into the UK to chant 'Death to the Arabs!'

June 2025: Keir Starmer’s government urge police to investigate the punk band Bob Vylan for inciting racial hatred and public order offences after chanting “Death, death to the IDF!” at the Glastonbury music festival.

At that time, the IDF, Israel’s military, is known to be responsible for killing and maiming more than 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with many thousands more dead under Gaza’s rubble. The United Nations; every major human rights organisation, including Israeli ones; and the International Association of Genocide Scholars have all agreed that Israel and its military are committing genocide in Gaza.

Lisa Nandy, Britain’s sports and culture secretary, calls the chant against the IDF – and the BBC’s inadvertent broadcasting of it – “appalling and unacceptable”. Keir Starmer terms the chant “appalling hate speech”. They agree that Bob Vylan and another band, Kneecap, should have never been given “a platform” by either Glastonbury or the BBC. There is widespread agreement in the media and Westminster that the chant is evidence of antisemitism.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, revokes a visa for Bob Vylan to perform in the United States – a move that the Starmer government does nothing to protest.

October 2025: West Midlands police announce that they are barring Tel Aviv Maccabi fans from attending a match in Birmingham against Aston Villa next month because of fears of violence. Tel Aviv’s supporters are notorious for their racist and violent behaviour, both inside Israel and abroad.

Nearly a year ago, there were ugly riots in Amsterdam’s streets provoked by the Tel Aviv fans – many of whom have served or are serving in the IDF – after their team lost against local side Ajax. Inside the stadium and later on the streets, the Tel Aviv fans could be heard chanting ”Death to the Arabs” and “There are no more schools in Gaza because we killed all the kids!”.

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Despite the Tel Aviv fans instigating the Amsterdam violence, much of it caught on video, Dutch and British politicians and media initially went out of their way to portray the Tel Aviv fans as the victims – until, confronted with the evidence, that narrative collapsed. For example, David Lammy, then Britain’s foreign secretary, lost no time writing on X: “I utterly condemn these abhorrent acts of violence and stand with Israeli and Jewish people across the world.”

It was precisely these “violent clashes and hate crime offences” in Amsterdam that lead West Midlands police to decide its officers will not be able to safely police the Europa League match in Birmingham, scheduled for November 6. They term it “high risk”.

But once again, Starmer and his ministers seek to revive the early, confected Amsterdam narrative, this time suggesting that it is the the Tel Aviv football hooligans that are in danger from Aston Villa fans, that any resentment from Aston Villa fans towards Tel Aviv fans is driven solely by antisemitism rather than by the Tel Aviv fans’ long record of genocidal chants and racist violence, and that the police decision to bar the Tel Aviv hooligans is capitulation to “antisemitism”.

Starmer himself wants the police decision overruled. Ed Miliband, his energy secretary, says: “We cannot have a situation where any area is a no-go area for people of a particular religion or from a particular country.”

But as happened with the official Amsterdam narrative, Starmer’s utterly implausible narrative regarding the Aston Villa game collapses almost immediately. On Sunday, Israeli football authorities are forced to call off a derby between Maccabi and another Tel Aviv team after both sets of fans riot.

Conclusions:

1. British police should not be dealing with the matter of the Aston Villa game. It should never have been thrown into their lap. Tel Aviv Maccabi would not be playing in the UK, or anywhere else in Europe, if Israeli sports team were banned from all international competitions, as they should have been long ago. Russia has been banned. So why are Israeli teams still competing? Israel’s genocide in Gaza is far more egregious than anything done by Moscow in Ukraine. The Tel Aviv fans wouldn’t be coming to the UK if their team wasn’t playing.

2. If Starmer and his ministers were so sure that a British punk band needed prosecuting for chanting “Death to the IDF!”, why are they so keen to overturn a police decision and invite foreign fans to the UK when it is widely understood both that those fans will bring their brand of genocidal rhetoric to British streets (“Death to the Arabs!”) and that they are certain to intimidate and use violence against Muslim and Arab communities in Birmingham? Why does the Starmer government think it so important to give special privileges to foreigners to platform their racial hatred, while seeking to remove any platform from British citizens, such as Bob Vylan, they accuse of spreading hate.

Remember this too. Bob Vylan used violent rhetoric against a racist and violent foreign army – a rhetoric neither the band nor its fans were in any kind of position to act on. The IDF is one of the strongest armies in the world; Bob Vylan’s fans pose no threat to it. The chant is better understood as chiefly symbolic: a punkish variation of “Down, down with the IDF!”

The Tel Aviv fans, however, are not just invoking violent, symbolic rhetoric. They are in a position to actually implement that violence in very practical ways – and not just in one setting, but two.

Some of these fans, either currently serving in the Israeli military or as reserve soldiers, have actually helped destroy almost every school in Gaza, and have been actively butchering Palestinian children – at least 20,000 children, the number that have been identified so far before the rubble is cleared.

But it goes further. These fans can, in fact, act out their violent chants and impulses in Birmingham by attacking anyone who looks Muslim or Arab. They can carry out their threats on Britain’s streets. It was obviously this assessment that led the West Midlands police to conclude that the fans should not be allowed to attend the match. Why would Starmer wish to overturn a decision to avert a real danger of violence from foreign fans directed at British citizens? Why is the supposed right of foreign fans to attend a football match being placed above the safety of the British public? Why are the supposed sensitivities of a group of hooligans more important than good race relations in Britain?

3. Once again, Starmer’s government is misrepresenting events – in this case, a decision by the police – as “antisemitic”. In the British political and media establishment’s view, is there anyone left in British society – apart, that is, from the political and media establishment – that isn’t “antisemitic”?

The government’s logic on antisemitism is clearly back to front. Violent, racist Israeli football fans do not represent Jews. They don’t even represent all Israelis. Similarly, an aversion to hosting violent, racist football fans is not antisemitism. It is a public order matter. Meanwhile, imagining that violent foreign football fans who chant “Death to the Arabs!” need protecting because they also happen to be Jewish, as Starmer is doing, is antisemitic and Islamophobic in equal measure.

In fact, it is racism of the ugliest kind – racism that clothes itself in the guise of anti-racism. By weaponising antisemitism in this utterly cynical way, Starmer discredits the real anti-racists and breathes life into the racist’s claim that Jews have special, alchemical powers that can invert the world, making “up” look like “down”, “black” look like “white”. It feeds the very worldview that led to pogroms against Jews across much of Europe and culminated in the Holocaust. Starmer knows this.

4. Politicians have long put pressure on football authorities to “stamp out racism” in the game. Yet, here is the Starmer government trying to normalise genocidally racist rhetoric in Britain by inviting it into a Birmingham stadium. If Tel Aviv fans are given a privileged platform to vent their “Death to the Arabs!” chants in the UK, why not accord the same privilege to racist fans from British clubs?

And if the police are forced to climb down on a decision against Tel Aviv Maccabi, what sort of precedent – practical and rhetorical, if not immediately legal – will this set for other violent actors?

5. Starmer is weaponising antisemitism in this way for purely political reasons, entirely unrelated to the safety of British Jews. This is not new from him, nor is he alone. The British establishment has been using “antisemitism” as a tool to wield against every and any threat to its continuing entrenchment of power.

Over the past five years, Starmer has used weaponised antisemitism against his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, an exceptionally rare case of a democratic socialist getting within scent of power, to oust him from the Labour party.

Once Corbyn was gone, Starmer used weaponised antisemitism against the left of the party to purge its members – one of the reasons his party has plumbed new lows in polling.

Starmer has used weaponised antisemitism against student movements that tried to highlight and end their universities’ culpability in financing and arming Israel’s genocide.

Starmer used weaponised antisemitism to outlaw Palestine Action, which targets factories in Britain sending weapons to Israel for use in the Gaza genocide and was piling additional pressure on his government to end arms sales to Israel.

Starmer is using weaponised antisemitism against ordinary, peaceful citizens who have held a placard supporting Palestine Action’s work.

And now, driven into a logical and ethical cul-de-sac through his relentless campaign of mischaracterising anti-racism as antisemitism, Starmer is implicitly accusing the police of antisemitism. Why? Because they are trying to protect British communities from the overspill of genocidal violence issuing from Israel.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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