WhatsappCoachella’s organizers were warned about the Irish band Kneecap and their anti-Israel stance.
(April 30, 2025 / JNS)
Every year, thousands of mostly young people descend on the Coachella Valley in Southern California for two weekends filled with music and arts. This year’s event included something else: anti-Israel hate.
During the second weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, on April 20, the Irish hip-hop/rap group Kneecap took to the stage. During their performance, the group led the crowd in the “Free Palestine” sinister chant, while on the screen behind the band, the words “F*** Israel. Free Palestine” were projected.
Band member Mo Chara (whose real name is Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh) told the audience: “The Palestinians have nowhere to go. It’s their f***ing home. And they’re bombing them from the skies. If you’re not calling it a genocide what the f**k are you calling it?”
Instead of Kneecap’s music skillfully bringing people together, they support terrorism against Jews while spreading hate against and libels about Israel.
But Kneecap forgot one point in its disgraceful Coachella performance: similarities between Coachella and the Nova music festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Some 380 young peace- and dance-loving men and women (and even some kids) who came to enjoy the bands, much like at Coachella, were butchered and burned in cold blood, while scores of others were wounded, raped or kidnapped during the Hamas-led terrorist attacks.
Kneecap’s stunt wasn’t an artistic statement. It was a rallying cry for hate that put a target on the backs of Jews throughout the world. The group likely knows this, as there has been a surge of antisemitism in their homeland of Ireland.
They were not the only band that used the stage to demonize Israel. The alternative rock band Green Day, whose songs were turned into the “American Idiot” Broadway show some years back, changed the lyrics of one of their songs to say “running away from pain like the kids from Palestine.”
In all likelihood, most of the Coachella audience knows very little, if anything, about the Oct. 7 massacre of concert-goers, as well as the conflict between Hamas and Israel. Still, they joined in the Jew-hatred sloganism.
This anti-hate display didn’t come out of nowhere.
Ari Ingel, the executive director of the nonprofit, pro-Israel Creative Community for Peace, reportedly reached out to Coachella organizer Goldenvoice and its owner, AEG, about Kneecap twice: on April 13 and April 15. Goldenvoice did nothing to prevent what was predicted to come, and then claimed they were blindsided by what took place.
Coachella management should be questioned and held accountable for allowing such a hate-provoking performance to take place. After all, do they want to be linked with such an act? Their appropriate public statement is required now.
During the Kneecap and Green Day performances, Coachella was turned into a venue where, among the music tunes, American youth received a dose of incitement to hate. Therefore, those who came to hear music and not hate-mongering must speak up.
Some, like Sharon Osbourne—a Jewish-British-American TV personality and wife of Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osbourne—and others in the music industry did so, with Osbourne calling for members of Kneecap to lose their U.S. entry visas.
Since antisemitism is a prohibited practice in the United States, the police should have been called in and closed the stage when the music was clouded by hate speech. Another suggestion: Kneecap should have been taken in for investigation and perhaps become persona non grata in the United States.
Young Americans are often an easy target for Israel-haters like Kneecap. Since Ireland has become a land that breeds hatred, it must not be allowed to corrupt American youth with its hatred. The Coachella organizers must take action to prevent their annual event from turning into the opposite of what it meant to stand for.
