It is one of life’s irksome axioms that if you court attention and controversy, you may well end up with more than you planned. You might even be faced with the prospect of being taken to court.

And so it has come to pass with Kneecap, an Irish punk-influenced hip-hop group that grabbed headlines after their performance at Coachella (one of the world’s largest music festivals) last month. One minute you’re projecting messages onto screens accusing Israel of genocide and the US government of enabling it, culminating in the poetic flourish of ‘F–k Israel Free Palestine’, and next minute you’re issuing a humiliating apology.

In this apology, Kneecap explained that they have never supported Hamas or Hezbollah. True, there is no evidence for this support. Aside from footage last year showing one member of the band shouting ‘Up Hamas, Up Hezbollah’ while draped in a Hezbollah flag, and leading chants of ‘ooh ah Hezbollah’, one member posting a photo of himself holding a book of the speeches of Hassan Nasrallah (the dearly dispatched leader of Hezbollah), and the band posting ‘solidarity with the Palestinian struggle’ on 8 October 2023 (before the genocidal Hamas-led invasion had been fully repelled and while the piles of dead, including hundreds of young people massacred at the Nova music festival, were still mounting).

Kneecap’s knee-trembling continued with their ‘heartfelt apologies’ to the families of the two British MPs who have been murdered in recent years, after footage of them emerged telling an audience, ‘The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.’ The band, apparently named for the IRA’s punishment of ‘kneecapping’, were aghast at the ‘suggestion that we would seek to incite violence against any MP or individual’.

All it takes is the announcement of an investigation by counter-terrorism police and gigs getting cancelled and, to the chagrin of many of their fans on social media, these heroic resistance revolutionaries caved in quicker than a busted yurt in a windblown Californian desert. Not very punk.

In fact, their anti-establishment cred should already have been in tatters after the band won a discrimination case against the UK government last year for withdrawing £14,250 in arts funding from it. ‘F–k the establishment – but we’ll use its laws and institutions to take its money!’  isn’t a catchy chant for its audience of cheering automatons, though.

In their statement attempting to defend themselves against a second bout of beastly injustice at the hands of the establishment that helps fund them, the band also charged that this is all a ‘smear campaign’ in which footage, ‘taken out of context, is now being exploited and weaponised’ in order to ‘manufacture moral hysteria’ and ‘derail the real conversation’.

Ah, of course. The textbook response of overt terrorism supporters nowadays is to allege that they are victims of unspecified shadowy forces orchestrating a campaign – one might say issuing protocols – as a silencing and distraction tactic. It could never be that people have organic human reactions of revulsion to such antics. The husband of Jo Cox, one of the slain MPs, said of the ‘half apology’ that, ‘to suggest it’s a conspiracy, that they have been targeted unfairly…doesn’t come across as unfortunately particularly genuine’.

Their argument of ‘silencing’ is also undermined by the fact that other acts showed support for the Palestinians at Coachella, including Green Day, but have not found themselves being accused of supporting Hamas and Hezbollah and inciting murder. I wonder why?

Indeed, there are many other artists who have been showing support for the Palestinians for some time and seem to have avoided a furore. Like Paul Weller, formerly of The Jam and The Style Council, who has been performing with a Palestinian flag on stage for over a year. Weller, who a while ago successfully sued Associated Newspapers for publishing photos of his children when the family was on a shopping trip in Santa Monica, has now signed onto an ‘artist statement’ supporting Kneecap, entitled ‘We stand for freedom of expression’. The statement notes, ‘It is in the key interests of every artist that all creative expression be protected in a society that values culture, and that this interference campaign is condemned and ridiculed.’ At the time of writing over 40 artists have signed on, including Massive Attack and Shirley Manson of Garbage.

It is pleasing that these artists believe that creative expression should be protected – let’s accept for the moment that shouts of ‘Kill your local MP’ do constitute creative expression. However, I have been unable to find any statements from them supporting Winston Marshall, formerly of Mumford & Sons, who left the band after being hounded for the heinous crime of praising a book by conservative commentator Andy Ngo, or J.K. Rowling, who has had her books removed from stores for the irredeemable sin of believing that people with penises should not be in women’s bathrooms, prisons or sports. Or for that matter, the numerous artists who have been subjected to real orchestrated campaigns of intimidation led by addled crank Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, to stop them from playing in Israel.

According to an article in the Times last month, the UK police make more than 30 arrests a day over offensive posts on social media and other platforms, and then there are other people who get visited by police or reported for the Kafkaesque ‘non-crime hate incident’. A video recently circulated online with a British police officer warning a man that saying ‘Speak English’ could be perceived as a hate crime.

Again, I am not aware that our brave champions of freedom of expression like Weller have done anything to ‘stand for’ these folks’ freedom of expression. But they’re not special people with taxpayer funding and awards standing on stage in front of thousands of people, so they don’t get to drape their utterances in the elitist cloak of ‘artistic freedom of expression’ and expect to be above the law.

One of the musicians who defied the pressure to cancel his show in Tel Aviv over a decade ago was John Lyndon, formerly Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. Last month he discussed this in an interview with the Irish Independent, noting how good it was to have so many Muslims in the audience, as ‘no Muslim nation has invited me’. On Gaza, he said, ‘Hamas are basically just Jew exterminators, that’s their only real purpose.’

These days, that’s true punk.