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Source: https://peterhimmelman.substack.com/p/when-fuk-israel-appears-at-one-of
At One of America's Most Popular Music Events, the Crowd Cheers for "Palestine"
(Substack) Peter Himmelman - At the 2025 Coachella music festival in California, a Northern Irish hip-hop group took the stage and began a chant: "Free, Free." The crowd answered on cue: "Palestine." Over and over again. Louder each time. Then came the message, projected across massive screens: "Free Palestine. F--k Israel." The crowd went wild. These men are savvy provocateurs who understand what a naive, young, ill-informed crowd wants, including the optics of morality - without the burden of holding real moral values. They handed them a chant, a cause, and the Jews - a familiar enemy that crops up in the world's dark imagination every 70 to 100 years. This was a carefully curated theatrical event in which Israelis - and by extension, the overwhelming majority of Jews around the world who support Israel - were being labeled genocidal. What irony. The memory of the brutal massacre at the nearly identical Nova music festival was completely erased. The rapes, the torture, the kidnappings - gone. October 7 vanished into the desert air, replaced by an easy-to-chant slogan and a false sense of righteousness. No mention of Hamas. No mention of the hostages. Just one message: Israel is the oppressive villain, Hamas and its supporters are the righteous defenders of freedom and justice. Israel is not a colonial implant - it is the historic homeland of the Jewish people, reconstituted after the Holocaust, a tiny drop of land surrounded by oceans of hostile forces from the moment of its rebirth. To call Israelis colonizers is not just historically inaccurate - it is a blood libel. I couldn't help but ask myself: What if Coachella had been overrun by Hamas? What if those same festival-goers had been hunted down in porta-potties, raped and genitally mutilated beside their friends, burned alive in their cars, or dragged into tunnels to be paraded as trophies? Would they be cheering for the men who did it? No. They would be screaming for justice. Screaming for rescue.