Boy George’s pro-Israel song is as punk as it gets

So now we know the most dangerous thing a pop star can do: stand up for Jews. You used to have to snort a binbag of cocaine or say the queen ‘ain’t no human being’ to rattle the moral majority. Now you just have to say that the rape and murder of Jewish people is a bad thing and anyone who supports it is a brainwashed twat. Just ask Boy George.

The old Culture Club star has been branded ‘nauseating’, ‘depraved’, ‘repellent’ and a ‘nasty little freak’ for saying he doesn’t hate Jews. Seriously. He’s released a song called ‘We Will Dance Again’, which has the haunting refrain: ‘If you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.’ The digital mob has gone nuts. ‘Zio lover!’, they’re crying, in the same demented cadence that Nazis once barked: ‘Jew lover!’

Boy George has committed the cardinal sin in the eyes of the keffiyeh cult – he’s mentioned 7 October. Doesn’t he know that to the wild-eyed Jew erasers of the bourgeois left, 7 October 2023 is the day Israel’s ‘genocide’ started, not the day that a 6,000-strong army of Islamofascists invaded the Jewish State by air, sea and land to slaughter more Jews in one day than anyone else had since the Nazis? Quick, someone reprogramme him.

‘You never mention October 7’, he sings to his fellow creatives who mistake hating Israel for virtue. ‘Young girls raped against trees / Murdered brutally / For the crime of dancing’, he sings of the carnival of fascist violence that Hamas brought to the Nova music festival. In fact, far from condemning that Nazi-like savagery, musicians giddily wrapped themselves in the flag under which it was carried out, he says. ‘Musicians holding flags, mouthing like sheep / Propaganda fuelled by the internet, feels so weak.’

He’s not wrong, is he? For many of us, it was a grim moral awakening to see Western festivalgoers wear like a holy shroud the flag that was the last thing Israeli music-lovers saw before they were butchered by racists. It felt like treason against the Jews, against humanity in fact. Boy George knows who the real genocidal maniacs in the Middle East are: Hamas. Of course the Israelis went to war with that army of anti-Semites, he sings, because they know those nutters ‘want to kill every last one of us’.

It’s his refusal to call Israel’s war on Hamas a ‘genocide’ that has really got the goat of the one-eyed Israelophobes. The opening line to his song is: ‘You say genocide, I say war.’ For that, he’s been tarred a ‘genocide denier’ and a moral slave to ‘the Zionists’ (they mean Jews). ‘How much were you paid for your soul?’, ask keffiyeh cultists, because to these people everyone who backs the Jewish State must surely be in receipt of a fistful of shekels. But they’re not anti-Semites. Oh, definitely not.

Boy George’s refusal to parrot the disgusting defamation of ‘genocide’ feels properly rebellious. It takes a near-Herculean spine for a pop star to defy the cultural establishment’s Stepford-like demand that everyone bow down to the dogma that the Jewish State is a uniquely monstrous entity. In resisting the siren-like lure of the genocide lie, that libellous mantra that might grant one access to cultural high society but which destroys one’s soul in the process, he has struck a blow for truth – and for punk.

The unhinged response to his correct labelling of a war as a war reveals so much about the genocide libel. It confirms it’s a charge born less from judicious analysis than from a kind of frothing religious fervour. It’s the Kool-Aid of the cultural elite, the poison you must dutifully sup to stay sweet with the dinner-party set. This is why those of us who refute the genocide charge are not only accused of being ‘wrong’ but also of being human-form demons who are doing the bidding of the most evil people on Earth, yada yada – because it’s not a well-sourced accusation but the neo-religious delusion of a morally deracinated class of people who’ve found some sliver of meaning in their shared loathing for the world’s only Jewish nation.

Boy George’s refusal of this libel is the most punk thing to have happened in pop in years. Forget Kneecap and Bob Vylan and that old mug, Roger Waters. Their Israel-bashing is about as rebellious as The Osmonds. All they’re doing is serving up Gaza slop for privileged pricks who’ve made Israelophobia their whole-ass personality. In condemning Hamas and saying Israel isn’t evil, Boy George has put up a glorious middle finger to all the cultural conformists cosplaying as rebels.

Not to be an ethno-narcissist about it, but I’m starting to wonder if there’s something about being second-generation Irish that inoculates one to the lunacy of Israelophobia. Johnny Rotten has called out Hamas as ‘Jew exterminators’. Morrissey says the BDS movement is ‘absurd and narrow-minded’ and it means ‘forbidding the freedom of speech’. He also wrote a song called ‘Israel’ in which he said people ‘rain abuse upon you [because] they are jealous of you’. And now we have George O’Dowd saying the genocide charge is bollocks. Plastic Paddies for Israel – who’s in?

But just one thing, George. How come you can correctly identify a war as a war but not a bloke as a bloke? You can see through the genocide lie but not the lie that says you can have a cock and be a woman. Come on – you’ve spurned the fashion for hating Israel, now have a think about the fashion for letting men into women’s spaces.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.