Kneecap to play Paris concert in defiance of objections

PARIS: Irish rap group Kneecap, one of whose members faces a British terror charge for allegedly supporting Hezbollah, are to perform outside Paris on Sunday, despite objections from French Jewish groups and government officials.

The local authorities have also withdrawn their subsidies for the music festival where the trio will play — the annual Rock en Seine festival, held in the Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud — after organisers kept the controversial band on the programme for their slot from 1630 GMT.

Strongly backing the Palestinian cause and bitterly criticising Israel, the group from Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, have turned concerts into political events.

Liam O’Hanna, 27, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, was charged in England in May accused of displaying a flag of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah during a London concert in November.

They played a closely scrutinised concert at the Glastonbury Festival in June, where Chara declared: “Israel are war criminals.”

The group later missed playing at the Sziget Festival in Budapest after being barred from entering the country by the Hungarian authorities, a close ally of Israel.

Kneecap, who also focus on Irish republicanism, are controversial within the UK and Ireland, more than two-and-a-half-decades after the peace agreement that aimed to end the conflict over the status of Northern Ireland.

The group takes its name from the deliberate shooting of the limbs, known as “kneecapping”, carried out by Irish Republicans as punishment attacks during the decades of unrest.

‘Confident’

“We are confident that the group will perform in the correct manner,” Matthieu Ducos, director of Rock en Seine, told AFP ahead of the festival.

The municipality of Saint-Cloud for the first time withdrew its 40,000-euro ($47,000) subsidy from Rock en Seine.

The wider Ile-de-France region that includes Paris also cancelled its funding for the 2025 edition.

However, such moves do not jeopardise the viability of the festival, whose budget was between 16 million and 17 million euros this year.

The group has already played twice in France this summer — at the Eurockeennes festival in Belfort and the Cabaret Vert in Charleville-Mezieres — both times without incident.

But the concert comes against a background of concerns about alleged high levels of antisemitism in France in the wake of the October 7, 2023 attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on Israel and the devastating assault on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip that Israel launched in response.

“They are desecrating the memory of the 50 French victims of Hamas on October 7, as well as all the French victims of Hezbollah,” said Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), calling for the concert to be cancelled.

Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said vigilance would be required against “any comments of an antisemitic nature, apology for terrorism or incitement to hatred” at the event.