RUTHFULLY YOURS

Johnny Rotten is revolting again. This time it’s not the monarchy or the music industry the sexagenarian Sex Pistol has in his sights. It’s the suffocating celebrity consensus that says Israel is the world’s nastiest nation and its war on Hamas is a crime against humanity. Actually, says Rotten, the Jewish nation is a pretty democratic one, and Hamas is nothing more than a bunch of ‘Jew exterminators’. And there it is, the truth, as only a punk could put it.

It was in an interview with the Irish Independent that John Lydon – as he’s now known – stuck two fingers up at today’s fashionable Israelophobia. The reporter reminds him that his band, Public Image Limited, played in Tel Aviv in 2010 and asks if he would ever do so again. The ‘right’ reply to such a query, of course, is to say: ‘No. Never. I swear. Please don’t cancel me.’ Rotten’s reply? Basically: yeah, why the hell not.

He says he had a hoot playing in Israel. ‘The country is more mixed than you’re led to believe, it’s not just “Jews only”, far from it’, he said. Cue pearl-clutching from every luvvie who thinks Israel is an ‘apartheid state’ because some tit at the Guardian told them it was. ‘There were lots of Muslims in the audience when I played there’, he said. Then his killer line: ‘That was special because no Muslim nation has invited me, not ever.’

I can’t get enough of this. Where celebs normally trot out whatever anti-Israel crap they’ve heard from TikTok’s time-rich white kids in keffiyehs, here comes Johnny with the truth. The truth that Muslims in Israel are freer than Muslims in Muslim countries. They’re even allowed to rock out to the world’s best-known punk. How come? Here Lydon really hits his stride, giving voice to a truth that’s become surreally unsayable in polite society – it’s because Arabs in Israel ‘get the same rights as a Jew’, he says. The man doesn’t lie.

But surely, says the interviewer to Lydon, you can see why people would ‘object’ to you playing in Israel? Guess what? He can’t. These people just don’t know what they’re talking about, he says. If you’re one of those halfwits who thinks visiting the Jewish State is the great unwashable sin of our age, then ‘you’re working on what you’ve been told rather than what you found out for yourself’, he says. You’ve been ‘indoctrinated rather than educated’. Preach, John.

He makes a stirring plea for diversity of thought. The clamorous pressure on people to boycott Israel speaks to a crisis of free conscience, he says. It seems everyone is ‘flowing this one poisonous way that does not accept freedom of differences of thought’. ‘If you want diversity’, he says, then you have to ‘accept diverse opinions’. Exactly right. Including the opinion – fact, actually – that Israel is not the evil, racist, colonial hellhole that the tossers of conformism would have you believe.

It gets better: Johnny comes for Hamas. The interviewer asks him about Donald Trump’s AI-generated vision of Gaza as a gold-plated Vegas on the Med. ‘A wicked sense of humour’, says Lydon. It’s clearly the wrong answer. ‘[It’s] hardly funny for the people living there’, says the interviewer, haughtily. Actually, says Lydon, if I lived in Gaza ‘I’d welcome the influx of money’. ‘Hamas are basically just Jew exterminators, that’s their only real purpose, they don’t correct the environment for [their] citizens’, he says. So, yeah, maybe we need something new, ‘to end the troubles’.

Jew exterminators. This is, without question, the truest and most important thing I have heard any public figure say about Hamas. Reading Rotten say that, I understood how the kids of 1977 must have felt when they heard him snarl ‘God Save the Queen’. It felt like a jolt, almost like an ideological insurgency, to see a non-Jewish public figure speak so plainly about Hamas’s fascistic ambitions, its genocidal dream of destroying the Jews.

It shouldn’t, of course. It should be widely known that Hamas is a Jew-killing machine masquerading as a national-liberation movement. It should come naturally to the self-styled radicals of popular culture to condemn this virulently racist, misogynistic, homophobic movement that carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust on 7 October 2023. Yet it doesn’t. Instead, lefties and luvvies and pop’s idiot crooners buy into the lie that Hamas is a resistance movement. They damn as ‘genocidaires’ not Hamas, but the brave young Jews who fight against it on the tragic battlefield of Gaza. Indoctrination indeed.

The dictionary defines punk as a ‘fast, loud and aggressive’ revolt against ‘conventional attitudes’. How fabulous to see Rotten, 69, still doing that. His anti-racist fury with Hamas shatters the lazy bourgeois prejudices of 2025 as much as the Sex Pistols did in late-Seventies Britain. The most stifling cultural orthodoxy of our age is to hate Israel. To pull on a keffiyeh, holler ‘From the river to the sea!’, and damn the Jewish nation as the most evil nation. Every opinion-making, Sally Rooney-reading, macchiato-quaffing prick will applaud you. Yet here’s Johnny, the punk who won’t die, with something rarer and more enticing: the truth. Never mind the bollocks, listen to Rotten.

Lydon does something wonderful: he brings to bear the moral sensibilities of the English / Irish working class against the faux-progressive bigotries of the elites. Against their anti-democratic wailing, he speaks up for Brexit. In the face of their Trump Derangement Syndrome, he says it makes sense that working-class Americans voted for Trump. And in reply to their frenzied Israelophobia, he says it’s Hamas that’s the problem.

He embodies the wisdom of the masses in an era of elite hysteria. And they hate him for it. ‘John Lydon’s rotten politics’, said a headline in the Guardian 15 years ago, when Lydon first spoke up for Israel. They’re The Man now, raging against Rotten for doing that thing the little people are never meant to do: tell their betters to fuck off.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy