Excerpt from the brilliant Dave Rich's substack on the interview.
'There’s a lot that could be said about Louis Theroux’s interview with Bobby Vylan, real name Pascal Robinson-Foster, on Theroux’s podcast. I even started to write a lengthy post detailing all the ways in which Theroux’s soft-soaping of Vylan differed from his usual probing, discomforting interview style. I looked up sources to explain why Theroux’s argument that “post-Holocaust Jewish exceptionalism” is to blame for the spread of ethno-nationalism in Hungary is historically illiterate; why Vylan’s association of white supremacy with Zionism is ignorant and foolish; and why both contribute to, and reflect, antisemitic ways of thinking that are all too common nowadays.
And then I stopped, because after Manchester, I am fed up continually turning to patient, rational explanation to try to tackle antisemitism. It’s demeaning, apart from anything else. It’s almost expected that this will be the Jewish response, but it shouldn’t need a 1,000 word Substack post to explain why calling for death is a problem.
There’s a part of the interview where Theroux and Vylan discuss the latter’s notorious “Death to the IDF” chant at Glastonbury, and they go back and forth about whether Vylan really meant death, or did he just mean that he wants the end to the IDF as an institution, but “End to the IDF” wouldn’t rhyme, and it’s just a figure of speech, and so on.
Except a month before Glastonbury, Vylan had called for “Death to every single IDF soldier out there”, at a concert at Alexandra Palace n London. In Amsterdam last month he told a concert audience ““Fck the Zionists! Get out there and fight them! Get out there and meet them in the street. Get out there and let them know that you don’t stand by them.” And at another gig in Spain in August, Vylan said:
We do support the right to an armed resistance. ‘Cause we ain’t no fcking pacifists. We ain’t the nonviolent type. Because we understand. We understand that in dealing with tyrannical fcking governments, you need to be violent sometimes… We are for an armed resistance. We wanna make that explicitly fcking clear.”
I don’t know why Theroux failed to ask Vylan about any of these other quotes. Perhaps he did, and it was edited out. Perhaps he’s lazy and didn’t do his research properly. Or maybe he didn’t bring it up because it would wreck the entire narrative that Vylan is a cuddly peacenik who has been misrepresented by the evil right wing press and Zionist white supremacists. Frankly, I don’t care what the reason is. All I know is that after Manchester, I have much less tolerance for this kind of nonsense.
Incidentally, Vylan didn’t correct Theroux on whether he wants to see Israeli soldiers killed, despite having said at that gig in Spain that he wants to be “explicitly f*cking clear” that he does support violence and armed resistance. So he’s a coward, on top of everything else.'
'Theroux’s podcast was recorded before the Manchester attack, which he acknowledges in the introduction. But they still went ahead and published it anyway, as if the death of two Jews due to an Israel-hating jihadist doesn’t change the context of an interview with someone who became famous for calling for death for Israelis. Theroux opens his questioning of Vylan with the classic motif of liberal white guilt, saying “I guess my starting point is… we’ve got very different life experiences, I’m conscious of all the privilege I’ve enjoyed”; but when it comes to the life experiences of the Jewish community, experiencing more religious hate crime per head than any other community in the UK, Theroux and Vylan breezily wave it away. It’s a form of privilege all of its own, the ability to be so dismissive of antisemitism and yet retain a sense of their own progressive righteousness.'