“Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered. But never before have I watched as soldiers enticed children like mice into a trap, and murdered them for sport.” When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Christopher Hedges spoke these words, it was 2001. A quarter century has passed since then; that darkness has only grown deeper and more suffocating.
What the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) wages in Palestine is not a war. It is the corrosive tale of moral decay, corruption and shamelessness. A spectacle in which every human value, every scale of conscience, has been shattered beyond recognition. Back then, children in Gaza were lured into traps and killed like vermin. Today, in the same Gaza, they are torn apart while gazing at the sea, sharing dry bread in a cafe or searching for water with cracked lips darkened by hunger.
At Glastonbury Music Festival, when Bob Vylan’s voice rang out with the slogan “Death to the IDF,” the audience recoiled in shock. As though an unspeakable hate crime had been committed, Western media rushed to plaster those words across headlines, twisting them beyond all recognition. What staggering hypocrisy: An army that kills a hundred Palestinians daily, that starves and leaves 2 million human beings thirsty, is questioned less than a musician’s cry of outrage.
Yet the truth is simple and searing. Bob Vylan’s “Death to the IDF!” was not a battle cry but a scream from the last threshold of human conscience. It was not a wish; it was the howl of helplessness. When an army bombs children playing marbles by the sea and incinerates civilians in cafes under a rain of missiles, everyone who remains silent becomes complicit in that barbarity.
And yes, Bob Vylan is now paying the price for speaking a few words on stage. His United States visa has been revoked; police in the United Kingdom have launched an investigation. They don’t even pretend to hide which side they’re on: They protect and applaud the child killers, and they prosecute anyone who dares wish them an end. In all of history, how many times has such a naked rot been on display?
The death toll Israel has rained on Gaza over the past two years defies any ledger of numbers. Some children’s bodies disintegrated in their mothers’ arms. Some were buried nameless, unrecorded. Babies were left to die in incubators, their corpses left to decay. In the eyes of every child was the same question: Why? What have we done? Bob Vylan’s furious cry is born of the void where those questions remain unanswered.
When exposing a crime is treated as a graver offense than committing it, the world has truly lost its mind. Today, U.N. reports and international human rights organizations issue warning after warning: What is happening in Gaza is genocide. To annihilate a people with starvation, siege, and bombs is an atrocity so vile that even calling it a black stain on history is too mild. To feel no anger at this is to renounce one’s own humanity.
Those eager to condemn Bob Vylan’s words should first reckon with the slaughter of 400 civilians, the babies who died of hunger, the people whose only crime was being Palestinian. Attacking a musician’s cry is easy. What’s hard is confronting the governments that cheer the massacre, the warplanes that rain death, and the pundits who normalize genocide on television.
Today, in the heart of the so-called modern world, people’s every artery is being severed. No electricity, no water, hospitals reduced to rubble, bread a miracle. The bombs never cease. And we are still debating a slogan shouted at a festival? This hypocrisy is how history’s greatest disgraces have always been covered up. The screams in the Nazi camps were silenced. In Rwanda, Srebrenica, Halabja, rage was first suppressed. Then the corpses were counted.
The language of conscience is harsh. It cannot be softened or blunted. Bob Vylan’s words are an honorable declaration that we must not remain silent in the face of barbarity. Perhaps they are one of the last echoes that remind us there is still a shred of humanity left in this world.
And yes, if exposing a crime is deemed more shameful than committing it, the world has truly gone mad.
