By Cain O’Mahony
The faux ‘outrage’ over the West Belfast rappers Kneecap, which hasnow led to an investigation by counter-terrorism police,is an attempt to smear the Palestinian solidarity movement – and a nasty piece of spite by the British State.
The row started after a Kneecap gig in November 2024, when the group made some stupid, impromptu comments about supporting Hamas, which few would support, and in calmer times off the stage neither do Kneecap themselves. They also had some harsh words for Israel about their murderous genocide in Gaza.
This infuriated the pro-Israel lobby, who whipped up ‘Storm Number One’, as usual seizing on any such comments in an attempt to portray those who protest about Israel’s attacks on Gaza as ‘supporters of terrorism’.
Not content with this, they then set considerable resources in motion to trawl through every bit of footage of Kneecap they could find, and triumphantly came up with ‘Storm Number Two’. They found the ‘only good Tory is a dead one’ etc, remarks from a gig in November 2023. It has taken over 18 months for everyone to suddenly become enraged – no comments were made about it at the time.
Most of their material is spontaneous and high-energy
Again, these are not comments we would support, but the ‘outraged’ are acting as though Kneecap were standing for election, or publishing a political manifesto. They’re not – they’re hard-arsed West Belfast rappers. Like all rappers, most of their material is spontaneous, fast, furious, in a high energy environment, and like all entertainers play to the audience – an audience that was probably as anti-Israeli and anti-Tory in equal measure.
As Kneecap have said in a statement released to the media: “An extract of footage, deliberately taken out of all context, is now being exploited and weaponised, as if it were a call to action. This distortion is not only absurd – it is a transparent effort to derail the real conversation.”
They added: “We condemn all attacks on civilians, always. It is never okay. We know this more than anyone, given our nation’s history.” They have also stated that they do not support Hamas or Hezbollah.
Yet still the witch-hunt of Kneecap is reaching a frenzy, with Tory MPs asking questions in Parliament, reams of bile in the national media calling for Kneecap to be cancelled, and now even an investigation by counter-terrorism police.
Perhaps the most ridiculous is a readership poll in the Daily Express on whether Kneecap should be banned from appearing at this year’s Glastonbury Festival (as we all know, you can’t move at Glastonbury for all those Daily Express readers…).
But there are suspicions that sections of the British state have seized upon ‘Storm Number Two’ for different reasons.
The National Union of Journalists held its national conference at the end of April, just as the row about Kneecap was beginning to bubble up. The debate around the conference bars was: was Kneecap the real target – or is it a vindictive ‘proxy war’ against Trevor Birney?
Police collusion in Loughinisland killings
Trevor Birney is a Northern Ireland film maker who produced the acclaimed film Kneecap about the West Belfast rappers, which propelled them to global fame.
But Birney, along with journalist and NUJ member Barry McCaffrey, also made another film, No Stone Unturned. This was about the Loughinisland killings, which revealed how the Northern Ireland police had colluded in protecting the Loyalist gunmen who murdered six Catholic men as they watched a World Cup football match in the County Down village in 1994.
During the making of the film, the pair faced continual harassment. They were put under undercover surveillance by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), their phone records were accessed by the Metropolitan Police, and then they were arrested and their homes and offices raided. They were treated as though they were the terrorists.
When the case came to Court, the High Court Judge found that Birney and McCaffrey had always acted within the law during their investigative work, and the PSNI were ordered to pay them damages of over £800,000.
With the help of the NUJ and Amnesty International, the pair then took both the PSNI and the Metropolitan Police to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal – this Tribunal was originally set up in 2000 by the Blair Government, to which people can take the intelligence services, if they feel they have been illegally spied on.
In December, Birney and McCaffrey again won their case, with yet more fines for the two police services. At its April conference, the NUJ congratulated the pair, and have now called for a full Public Inquiry into the affair, as the Tribunal only has limited powers.
The suspicion is that the embittered and vengeful police services can’t get at Birney directly – he’s twice beaten them off in the Courts – so they are harassing those within his environs, such as Kneecap, to scare people away from working with him.
After the Tribunal, McCaffrey criticised the complete waste of police resources put into harassing him and Birney and trying to scare them off the story. He said: “They wasted police time and resources going after us instead of the Loughinisland killers” (BBC, December 17, 2024).
Now, once more, police time and resources are to be wasted with the investigation by the counter terrorism police – to see if Kneecap are terrorists. They’re not and everybody knows they’re not. The police would be better employed hunting down real terrorists. Like the murderers who carried out the Loughinisland killings, perhaps? And those who protected them.
Feature photograph from the official Kneecap website, here. Inset photograph from Wikimedia Commons, here.
