Morning Star Editorial: Glastonbury furore shows how fast our freedoms are being dismantled
Bob Vylan performing on the West Holts Stage, during the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset, June 28, 2025ARE concessions to coax MPs into voting for cruel social security cuts a sign that the Starmer government is listening and learning?
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The Prime Minister demands an explanation from the public broadcaster for failing to suppress footage of crowds chanting in solidarity with Palestine at a music festival. The organisers of a peaceful demonstration in January are up in court next week for alleged breaches of police restrictions by laying flowers in memory of Gaza’s dead children in the road. The police are reviewing footage of the Glastonbury crowds, trying to sniff out behaviour they can prosecute someone for.
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The BBC, falling over itself to make amends for failing to meet Starmer’s censorship preferences, smears the singer Bobby Vylan, accusing him of “anti-semitic sentiments” for leading chants of “Death to the IDF” (Israel Defence Forces).
But to denounce an army is not to denounce a race. And given serving IDF soldiers revealed in the Israeli press just last week that the IDF is actually ordering its troops to fire into unarmed crowds of Palestinians gathering to collect food from its tightly controlled aid centres — a sick “hunger games” scenario in which over 500 Palestinians have already been gunned down — it’s understandable that feelings against this genocidal military are running high. Anyone who thinks Vylan’s chants are more “appalling” (the PM’s term) than the government’s continuing supply of arms and intelligence to facilitate mass murder has their priorities wrong.
The gravity of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s proposed Palestine Action ban cannot be overestimated. To try to head off any potential opposition by MPs, she has lumped the direct-action group with two neonazi formations, the Maniac Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement, in a single banning order.
To label a group terrorist for splashing paint on military aircraft is an outrage, one that as others have noted would define as terrorist some of Britain’s best known historical protest movements, from the Greenham Common women to the Suffragettes.
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Gaza: Doctors under attack
Louisa Compton, Channel 4 Head of News and Current Affairs and Specialist Factual and Sport said
The job of journalists is to tell the stories that people need to know. Often, that means telling stories that other people, the people who are subjects of our investigations, would rather were not heard.
Few situations in the world today have illustrated those two truisms more clearly than the October 7 massacres in Israel and the 21 months of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza that followed.
One of the ways in which the reality of that situation has been reported – and to many people’s way of thinking has been under-reported – is the story of how the fighting has embroiled the medical services operating in Gaza.
On Wednesday night, Channel 4 will screen Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, a documentary produced during much of that long period of conflict, which offers powerful evidence that the doctors, nurses and paramedics of Gaza have been denied the non-combatant protection that the norms of warfare usually offer them.
Their hospitals have become combat zones, their very operating theatres have been conscripted into the military theatre of operations.
One side says this has happened through the deliberate choice of their enemy. The other side says it is an unavoidable result of their enemy’s tactics.
Perhaps this is the new normal of warfare, because the whole conflict, from the first murderous moments of the October 7th massacre of innocents to the latest report of machine guns aimed at food queues, has shifted norms in disturbing ways.
In this particular aspect, each side accuses the other of denying medicine its neutrality. The Israel Defence Force says Hamas uses hospitals, patients and medical staff as shields for terrorist headquarters; Gaza’s health authorities and medics accuse the IDF of besieging those hospitals, forcibly evacuating those patients, detaining, terrorising, brutalising and targeting those doctors, nurses and support staff.
In video that is terribly hard to watch and with testimony delivered through tears and anguish, this documentary presents evidence that Israel’s armed forces have deliberately dragged those offering medical aid into the frontline. It also reports the IDF’s strong denials of allegations that medics were tortured.
We are showing this programme because we believe that, following thorough fact-checking and verification, we are presenting a duly impartial view of a subject that both divides opinion and frequently provokes dispute about what constitutes a fact.
Channel 4 has a strong tradition of putting uncomfortable reporting in front of our audiences. In doing so, we know we will antagonise somebody somewhere sometime. But we do it because we believe it is our duty to tell important journalistic stories – especially those that aren’t being told elsewhere.
21.50 edit: Louisa Compton, Channel 4 Head of News and Current Affairs and Specialist Factual and Sport continued
Doctors Under Attack, was commissioned by another broadcaster which took a different view of the original content and decided not to broadcast it.
That other broadcaster will have had its own reasons for not showing the programme. For ourselves, after rigorous fact-checking and assessing the film against our own editorial criteria as well as against all regulatory requirements, we decided that it was both compliant with the Ofcom Broadcasting Code, but also that it was important journalism in the public interest. Any small changes were carried out with the producers to update the film and give viewers as much information as possible.
The result is harrowing, no doubt. It will make people angry, whichever side they take, or if they take no side.
But while we would never judge anyone who decides that showing something could create a risk of being thought to be taking sides, we believe there are times when the same risk is run by not showing anything at all.
dizzy: The other broadcaster referred to is BBC.
What REALLY Happened at Glastonbury
Israel at 77: A fragile state propped up by American power
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
by Adnan Hmidan
More than 77 years since the Zionist project was planted at the heart of the Arab and Islamic world, and despite enjoying unprecedented military, political and financial support from the West, particularly the United States, Israel remains a fragile entity. For all the rhetoric portraying it as a military and technological powerhouse, its survival still hinges on foreign intervention.
Since 1948, Western powers have mobilised every instrument available, politics, capital, science, and brute military force, to uphold this settler-colonial project. Thousands of Jewish experts and professionals were brought in from Europe, America and the former Soviet Union, while billions were poured into building a state on the ruins of an indigenous population, denied basic rights simply because Palestinians weren’t considered “white enough” to deserve them.
Over the decades, Israel has amassed a formidable arsenal: unregulated nuclear weapons, the Iron Dome missile defence system, and surveillance technologies exported to repressive regimes around the world. Its intelligence services have trained authoritarian states from Latin America to Africa, turning the occupation into a global model for control.
Yet the illusion is wearing thin.
Since the launch of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation in October 2023, Israel’s vulnerability has been laid bare. This is not a self-reliant regional power, it is an entirely dependent project. It cannot endure prolonged resistance without American military support, European political cover, and consistent Western economic backing.
During its latest assault on Gaza, Israel relied heavily on US ammunition, airlifts, and naval deployment. Against Iran, it proved unable to act independently, requiring Washington to step in on its behalf. Just this week, the United States bombed Iranian nuclear sites, including the Fordow facility, in what appeared to be a direct request from Tel Aviv; a dangerous escalation that threatens to ignite a wider regional war.
One is forced to question: What kind of “regional power” needs a global superpower to fight its battles? What kind of sovereignty is that?
READ: Gaza will not be defeated as long as there are people who refuse to stay silent
Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israel continues a policy of violent erasure; assassinations, home demolitions, mass arrests, and the systematic punishment of prisoners and their families. In Gaza, we are witnessing a genocide: famine, siege, and the total destruction of life and infrastructure.
Even the sanctity of Al-Aqsa Mosque has been violated. The compound has seen unprecedented closures, its prayer halls raided by night, copies of the Quran desecrated, and its guards detained, while much of the international community remains silent, if not complicit.
But what Israel fails to grasp is this: resistance is not confined to rockets. It is an idea, rooted, growing, and passed down through generations. From Gaza to the West Bank, and from Sana’a to Tehran, new alliances are taking shape. Palestine’s voice now echoes from Chicago to Cape Town.
Yes, Israel has a missile defence system, but it has no moral shield. Yes, it can carry out precision airstrikes, but it cannot destroy the idea of freedom that lives in the hearts of millions.
Seventy-seven years on, Israel still behaves like a spoilt, unruly child, forever looking to its powerful patron for protection. It lacks true independence, genuine sovereignty, and any sense of lasting security.
It is a heavily armed entity with a hollow centre. A state upheld not by legitimacy or justice, but by coercion and propaganda.
And that is why it will fall. Because ideas do not die. Because justice delayed is not justice denied. And because Palestine lives, in the ruins, in the camps, in memory, and in the future.
So the “state” that never matured will fall. And Palestine will endure, because it is the wound that never dried, and the truth that never fades.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.