Mark Steyn writes:
…and I wonder how those members of Britain’s aristorockracy feel about her in her present incarnation as Fleet Street’s lone Zionist – a tough gig in an age when HarperCollins’ Scottish map-making subsidiary wipes Israel off the face of the earth to avoid offending its Arab customers.
Steyn has recently mused/threatened to cover a Sex Pistol’s tune, which might, amusingly, get Burchill’s back up about something else.
She’s made no secret of the fact that she only covered/championed punk to get her teenaged, working class foot into the journalism door.
I never thought that was much of a secret, even at the time —The Boy Looked at Johnny is packed with pitiless swipes at numerous bands, with The Clash being favorite targets. Maybe if she’d known the band was 50% mischling she’d have been more sympathetic.
Anyway, last time I checked, John Lydon was loudly pro-Israel but he’s too mercurial to quote definitively on any topic.
But here’s Burchill’s report on same, circa 2010:
Massive Attack can join such anti-Israel heroes as Elvis Costello (so politically sophisticated that he once called Ray Charles “a blind, ignorant nigger”) and Bobby Gillespie – such a loss to the Brains Trust that he reportedly defaced a MAKE POVERTY HISTORY poster to make it read MAKE ISRAEL HISTORY. Allegedly he couldn’t spell “Israel” – “Isreal” was his Freudian version – and how extraordinarily arrogant to downgrade such an issue as world poverty simply to score a point.
Israel-haters can keep that grisly pair. In our corner, in the spirit of open-mindedness, we have the unique John Lydon, who will lead his group Public Image Limited in concert in Tel Aviv this month. “If Elvis f***ing Costello wants to pull out of a gig in Israel because he’s suddenly got this compassion for Palestinians, then good on him,” Lydon told the Independent. “But I have absolutely one rule, right? Until I see an Arab country, a Muslim country, with a democracy, I won’t understand how anyone can have a problem with how they’re treated.”
John Lydon: the voice of common sense versus the dark forces of universal hypocrisy.
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