Although I started out as a music journalist, I was always repelled by the idea of “festivals.” The tents. The lack of washing facilities. The toilets. When I was sent to the 1977 Reading Festival as a punishment for being cheeky to the editor, I took one look at the latrines and hightailed it straight home to write my report. Imagine my amusement when a workmate informed me that my fabrication was so atmospheric she could practically smell the crowd. So could I, the dirty swine, and I’d only been there for 10 minutes.

Yet Reading — and all festivals — are small beer compared to Glastonbury. For a few decades now, it’s been a religious pilgrimage for dafties, albeit dafties rich enough to afford the prices, ranging from a standard ticket at $500 or so — a rise of 50 percent in six years — to “glamping” in the Pop-Up Hotel, just outside the site, where the grand Tipi Tenthouse Suite costs $38,388  — and that’s without the price of a ticket to see the actual acts. 

Glastonbury — or, as devotees call it, “Glasto” — has been a hypocritical enterprise for a long time. The founder, cuddly 89-year-old “farmer” (he’s also a landowner, who inherited both farm and land from his father) Michael Eavis, makes many a slip between the theory and practice of identifying as “A Good Person.”

It became an issue recently when it transpired that despite fan-boying over the “great” lost leader of British “brocialism,” Jeremy Corbyn, and inviting him to appear onstage at the 2017 festival (“He’s got something precious … he really is the hero of the hour”), Mr Eavis’s tax arrangements appear far better suited to a  sharp-elbowed capitalist.

Last year, he took measures that mean he will avoid something like £80 million in inheritance tax; if it was any other rich man behaving this way, unhappy campers would accuse him of tax avoidance. Then there’s the gargantuan level of security practiced by Glasto security, in comical contradiction of the asylum-seeker-friendly NO BORDERS banners that may be frequently seen; an onsite “prison” exists, an inmate of which told the Times: “There was a weird mix of drug dealers, people who have been taken out of the festival for being too drunk or high, and those who had tried to break in.” Another unfortunate had to sleep under a foil blanket because he had been scammed $4,000, through no fault of his own, for a false entry wristband.

No hypocrisy on Mr. Eavis’s list of transgressions comes near what took place last weekend at the laughably named “Worthy Farm.” In 2011, he was quoted as lamenting the decline in political activity associated with the Glastonbury; this year was certainly political, but it was the politics of hate — specifically, hatred of Jews — and political more in the manner of a Nuremberg rally than a Woodcraft Folk jamboree.

The presence of Kneecap — a doltish Irish Catholic “rap” act that praises Hamas and Hezbollah — was already a known quantity and the anti-Israel, pro-Islam state broadcaster, the BBC, had reluctantly stated that they would not be streamed live lest their spewing of terrorist-chic cliches became too addled. 

However, a “rap” duo calling themselves “Bob Vylan” did perform live on the BBC, at first spouting the usual dreary yelps of “Free Palestine” that soon mutated into “Death to the IDF.” Calls for the murder of a group that contains Christian, Muslim, and Druze as well as Jewish young people seemed an extraordinary exhortation to violence under the aegis of a man who calls himself a lifelong Methodist.

It wasn’t surprising, in any event, that the BBC oversaw it, even though they’re now tying themselves in knots apologizing, as is Glastonbury Inc. itself. Glasto is the BBC’s work outing and the BBC is Glasto’s wet nurse; in 2017, the BBC refused to disclose the cost of its coverage, and how many employees would be attending, to a licence-payer’s consumer group, claiming it would breach European human-rights laws.

The BBC is no longer an arm of public service but a propaganda machine, pumping out the opinions of the ever-more irrelevant liberal establishment, preaching inclusivity and diversity — like Glasto — while marginalizing anyone who doesn’t mouth the same stale mantras on everything from immigration to Israel. 

Islamists are particularly keen on murdering youngsters at gatherings where they enjoy music. The Nova Festival. Bataclan at Paris. The bombing of the Ariana Grande show at Manchester. The murder of the little girls at the Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the U.K. last year. Yet dolts such as Kneecap and Bob Vylan take their side.

It’s Bully’s Best Friend syndrome — don’t come for me, Mr. Big Scary Jihadi Man, go for those defenseless kids over there. As Winston Churchill memorably said of those who pander to fascists: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.” As the ever-forthright Azealia Banks put it on X, “WHEN DID a MUSIC FESTIVAL BECOME THE VENUE FOR CHANTING ABOUT DEATH?”

No matter how much the BBC and Glastonbury attempt to backpedal from this — and they are doing so at such a rate that whiplash seems a certainty — they are both responsible for raising the temperature of the climate of hatred of Jews in this country. For irretrievably bringing the status of the British music festival closer to Altamont than Woodstock.

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Ms. Burchill’s Substack is julieburchill.substack.com.