Primal Scream gig antisemitic? WTF?!?

Guardian, December 11, 2025

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Sometimes linguistic nuances matter. (Ask the ghost of Derek Bentley.) What did the Guardian mean by London venue ‘appalled’ after antisemitic imagery allegedly screened at Primal Scream gig ?

That the image is unquestionably antisemitic but only alleged to have been screened?

That the image was screened, and is alleged to be antisemitic?

Since the Guardian’s record on Gaza genocide, like that of every other corporate media outlet in the West, has been appalling (no quote marks here!) I rule out careless ambiguity. No UK media story touching on Israel evades editorial scrutiny, on pain of dreaded call from Israeli Embassy, Jewish Chronicle, Labour/Conservative Friends of Israel etc, of every last comma.

The best interpretation I can allow is of deliberate, pusillanimous obfuscation. And the worst? That it intended the first reading; viz, that to show Israeli flag superimposed on Nazi swastika is antisemitic, and it agrees with the Community Security Trust – which the Guardian says ‘offers security, advice and training to protect British Jews’ – that “entwining a Star of David with a swastika implies that Jews …

“Jews”, mark you, not the genocidal colonial settler state.

… are Nazis and risks encouraging hatred of Jews”.  ¹

Over to Jonathan Cook.

It’s antisemitic to call out Israel’s genocide, says the Guardian

The band Primal Scream had the audacity to tell its audience that the British government is complicit in genocide. They have been reported to the police for doing so

On the matter of “antisemitism”, we are now so far down the rabbit hole that the word no longer need have any reference to “hating Jews”.

Even the supposedly liberal Guardian uses the term unquestioningly to mean “being nasty about Israel” – a state whose genocidal behaviour towards the Palestinian people over the past two years should mean it is almost impossible to say anything too nasty about it.

Take the following absurd headline from the paper: “London venue ‘appalled’ after antisemitic imagery allegedly screened at Primal Scream gig.”

Let’s deconstruct this headline. Notice there are no quote marks around “antisemitic”, meaning the paper takes it as read that the imagery is indeed antisemitic.

There are quote marks around “appalled”, indicating that the London venue, the Roundhouse, is being directly quoted rather than paraphrased. And the word “allegedly” is included throughout the article for legal reasons, and relates to the matter of the screening not the imagery, presumably in case the Roundhouse’s claim that the band Primal Scream displayed the image turns out to be factually incorrect.

So what was this unquestionably “antisemitic” imagery?

The story explains that Primal Scream projected a video on to a screen behind the band during their concert earlier this month in which a swastika merged with a Star of David, the symbol on the Israeli flags flying from tanks in Gaza.

The Guardian uncritically reports: “A spokesperson for the Roundhouse said they were ‘appalled that antisemitic imagery was displayed’ at the venue’,” and that it had apologised to “the wider Jewish community”.

The paper does nothing to distance itself, as it should have done, from this accusation. For example, it could have reported the incident as follows: “A spokesperson for the Roundhouse said it was ‘appalled’ at what it claimed was a display of ‘antisemitic imagery’.”

One can debate whether entwining the swastika with the Star of David is in bad taste, given that Israel chose to turn a Jewish symbol, the Star of David, into its national emblem, on its flag and on its warplanes. Remember, though, that it was Israel that intentionally created this confusion – not Primal Scream, not Israel’s critics.

One can also accept that Jews who identify with Israel probably found the screened image offensive.

The question is whether we should prioritise caring about offending those Jews and non-Jews who identify with Israel, even as it continues to slaughter and starve children in Gaza, more than we care about the Palestinians being murdered by the state worshipped by Israel’s supporters.

I would suggest those priorities are utterly back to front …

Read or listen to the full piece on Jonathan’s substack …

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1. I’m minded here of a post title Caitlin used last week, implicitly alluding to the deliberate conflation of a truly antisemitic smear, the blood libel of mediaeval Christendom, with abundant evidence of Israeli atrocity now. See I’m sorry if it’s antisemitic but I think it’s wrong to train dogs to rape prisoners.