‘Rot of the West': Jewish leader calls for pro-Palestine artist Bob Vylan's Glastonbury set to be met with ‘serious consequences'
Pro-Palestine artist Bob Vylan's Glastonbury set has marked a new level of 'rot' in the West, a Jewish leader has claimed.
British rapper Bobby Vylan - whose real name is Pascal Robinson-Foster - of punk duo Bob Vylan, led chants of 'death, death to the IDF' at the Glastonbury music festival over the weekend.
Executive Council of Australia Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin said there was 'little compassion' to be seen during Vylan's Glastonbury set, adding it appeared as though it was a 'Hezbollah rally in downtown Beirut and not a music festival in Somerset'.
'Almost 400 Israelis were butchered dancing at a festival, now they're using their festivals to preach hatred and chant for death. It's just extraordinary,' Mr Rychin told Sky News on Monday night.
Mr Ryvchin said the festival-goers had followed along with the chanting 'like sheep' and 'fanatics', and explained the gradual change of tune since Hamas invaded Israel in 2023.
'This movement, which really swelled post-October 7, it began by calling for ceasefires, as though it wanted peace and was anti-war. They very quickly dropped that and turned to donning their kaffirs and chanting for Palestine,' he said. — Avi Yemini (@OzraeliAvi) June 29, 2025
'Then they started cheering on Iranian rockets and Houthi drones, and now they've gone a step even further. Now they're openly calling for death.
'This is what they are, and it's not merely Glastonbury. The same chant was heard on the streets of Melbourne just last night.'
Mr Ryvchin said the calling for the death of a group of people should be met with 'serious consequences', otherwise such actions and rhetoric would 'go on and on'.
Spiked Online chief political reporter Brendan O'Neill said the performance was 'disgusting, racist, horrible' and questioned the direction in which the Western world was heading.
'Let's be honest about this, when you say death to the IDF, you are saying death to Jews, firstly, because the IDF is predominantly a Jewish army and, secondly, because everyone knows that the IDF is the force that protects the Jewish homeland from the armies of antisemites on its borders,' he told Sky News.
'So when you have this mob of young privileged Brits crying for the death of the IDF, they're essentially saying death to Israel, death to the Jewish homeland, death to Jewish people in the Middle East.
Mr O'Neill said since October 7, the world had seen the 'rot of the West rise to the surface'.
'We've seen all the backward, regressive trends in our own societies come to the surface,' he said.
'The horrible fact is that lots of young people in our own societies have taken the wrong side, and that should really worry us.'
United Kingdom Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said there was 'no excuse' for the kind of 'appalling hate speech' which was amplified to thousands of festival goers and millions at home watching.
'I said that Kneecap should not be given a platform and that goes for any other performers making threats or inciting violence,' he said.
'The BBC need to explain how these scenes came to be broadcast.'
Meanwhile, the United States State Department confirmed on Sunday it was considering revoking the British artists' visas following the "death to the IDF chants" before the duo travel to North America for a scheduled tour of 20 US cities including New York, Los Angeles and Boston.
A senior State Department official told The Daily Wire the Trump administration would not issue visas to "any foreigner who supports terrorists".
Avon and Somerset Police said video evidence of the set would be assessed to determine if a criminal investigation was warranted.
The Israeli embassy in the UK said it was 'deeply disturbed' by the chanting on stage at the festival, which has been widely condemned by artists and global leaders alike.
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Sydney Morning Herald
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The Age
an hour ago
- The Age
How ‘Gen Z's Mozart' almost dismissed Herbie Hancock's email as a joke
Understandably, Jacob Collier suspected one of his mates was pulling a prank. In 2013, when Collier was just 19, he uploaded a video to YouTube: a cover of Stevie Wonder's Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing, which he recorded at his family's home in London. Within a couple of days, it notched up more than 100,000 views, so he made it available for purchase online. Soon after, Collier – who will embark on his first arena tour of Australia in December – received an email informing him that Herbie Hancock had bought five of his recordings. Then came a message purporting to be from the jazz legend himself: 'Wow, Jacob! Your stuff is amazing. Please keep expanding in your life, as well as your music. I believe that craft may be about melody, rhythm, harmony, the notes etc but music is about life. -Herbie Hancock.' 'My first instinct was, 'Which one of my homies is trying to pull the wool over my eyes?'' says Collier, gazing at the Melbourne skyline from a top-floor suite, complete with a grand piano, in the Park Hyatt hotel. 'I just thought, 'This is insane!' But it really was Herbie.' This was followed by another pinch-me moment when his video came to the attention of Quincy Jones, one of the world's most acclaimed music producers. 'Quincy just lost his mind,' recalled Adam Fell, the president of Jones' production company. 'He said, 'I don't care what you're doing right now, I don't care how busy you are – find this kid'.' Jones was so taken with Collier's version of Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing that he would play it, alongside Wonder's original recording, to whomever he was meeting. 'It didn't matter if it was Paul McCartney or Queen Rania,' Fell told the BBC. 'Quincy would show them that video and say, 'I've never seen anything like this! Have you?'' 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He's collaborated with everyone from Joni Mitchell and Coldplay to Alicia Keys, David Crosby and the rapper Stormzy. And he has already won seven Grammy Awards, making him the only British artist to claim at least one Grammy for each of his first five studio albums. It's little wonder he's been labelled a 'genius', a 'jazz messiah' and the 'Mozart of Gen Z' by critics. 'Whatever he does blows my mind.' 'He's so in demand,' said Coldplay's Chris Martin, who is now a friend of the Collier family. 'We all recognised, 'Oh, this guy can make us sound better'.' Jones, who died last year, declared that 'whatever he does blows my mind'. Film composer Hans Zimmer raved that much of Collier's work 'is on the edge of the impossible', while Hancock went as far as to rank Collier's harmonic talents above his own. 'I thought I was good with harmonies,' he said, 'but he was all over my stuff – and past that.' But what is it that makes Collier's music so special? As Jones once explained, Western music has used the same 12 notes of the chromatic scale for several hundred years. But Collier likes to operate in the spaces in between, with an array of 'micro-notes' and 'quarter tones' that, incredibly, he can distinguish by ear. He also plays dozens of instruments. His cover of Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing, made entirely by himself, is a good example. On that track alone, he plays the guitar, mandolin, double bass, keyboard, piano, djembe drums, box drums, cowbell, egg shakers and a tambourine; he also recorded several different vocal elements – some of which sound peculiar in isolation – before stitching them together to form a beautifully layered whole. (His videos frequently use a split screen format to showcase each aspect.) 'I'd stay up until the early hours of the morning after spending a whole day at school,' Collier says. 'I was doing things harmonically and rhythmically that I'd never heard before. 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As in many of his previous performances, he will play choirmaster, inviting every member of the audience to get involved. 'It's a multi-genre show,' he explains. 'It has some structured elements but also some chaotic elements. There'll be some acoustic moments and some very dance, jazz, folk, electronic and rock 'n' roll moments. I love being in an operation that's very defined and rhythmic, but I also love that feeling of not knowing what's going to happen next.' TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO JACOB COLLIER Worst habit? Going to bed at 7am and waking up at 2pm. My sleep schedule is completely upside down. Greatest fear? My own apathy. I worry about numbing out to the world in a time of so much change. The line that stayed with you? Quincy Jones used to say, 'Don't try to be cool – be warm.' Biggest regret? The sacrifices made by the people I love most, to allow me to do what I do. I'm very, very grateful to them. Favourite book? Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. The artwork/song you wish was yours? September by Earth, Wind & Fire. Can you imagine having written that song? We blast it after every show so that everyone leaves on a high. If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? To an Earth, Wind & Fire concert in the 1970s. During his first tour of Australia in 2018, Collier used a video looping system and specially made harmoniser to perform a one-man concert. 'I was using all sorts of gizmos back then, but I've since traded a lot of those gadgets for people, which has been of great benefit to me,' he says. 'When I was a solo performer, I fell in love with the idea that, in the absence of bandmates, the audience becomes the band – and that's still an important part of the show because I love that communal feeling.' He doesn't hesitate when asked to name his biggest musical hero. 'My mum is number one, obviously,' he says. 'Of all the things I've done as a musician – starting with those multiscreen videos, then making albums and travelling all over the world – she's always lent her expertise and wisdom in a really lovely way. She even conducted the orchestra on my last album, Djesse Vol. 4. It was an amazing, full-circle moment to take the DNA of what I learned as a child and fold it into what I'm doing now.'
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