Challenge is better than bans

Submitted by AWL on 27 March, 2022 - 6:58 Author: Cathy Nugent
Lowkey

Rapper and left-wing activist Lowkey seems to have been pressured into withdrawing from a performance at National Union of Students (NUS) conference, after the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) objected on grounds of antisemitism.

Lowkey is a long-time supporter of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and Stop the War — but it’s not his commitment to those causes that is being attacked, at least directly. Lowkey is on the “ultra” end of left anti-Zionism, where it shades into left antisemitism. For example, he called Israel a “racist endeavour” in the middle of a row about the IHRA formula which describes as possibly antisemitic calling “the existence of a [i.e. any] state of Israel... a racist endeavour”. More recently he said the mainstream media “weaponised the Jewish heritage” of Zelensky to “stave off” inquiries about far right groups in Ukraine.

The charge that he is a conspiracy theorist, unless I’ve missed something, is thin: he said in a few lines of a verse that a controlled explosion was used on a tower on 9/11. But some of what he says is objectionable and concerning.

Then NUS insensitively suggested Jewish students use a “safe space” at the conference while Lowkey was performing if they were worried. The subsequent row has not been edifying. Tory MPs have joined in — politicians who are simultaneously “championing” free speech in Universities (against e.g. wokeness) and potentially limiting academic freedom (for e.g. Palestinian academics).

Lowkey’s a rap artist, a musician. Except in extreme cases (e.g. with fascists) it is never good to ban political views, and maybe even especially so with cultural figures. We are now in a position where nobody, certainly not UJS, is prepared to directly challenge views they disagree with. The first response is always to get people off platforms.

Yet we need to talk to Lowkey’s fans — who may never have even considered the issue of left-wing antisemitism, still less been exposed to a coherent critique of it.

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