Chants Are Not the Crime — Genocide Is

In recent months, Western leaders and media outlets have erupted in outrage — not at the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, not at the leveling of entire neighborhoods in Gaza, and not at the starvation used as a weapon of war — but at musicians daring to say “Free Palestine” or chant “Death to IDF” on stage.

Bands have been canceled, statements denounced, tours threatened — all for daring to speak, to sing, or to rage in solidarity with a people being systematically destroyed. Yet the same voices condemning these artists remain conspicuously silent about the Israeli government’s unrelenting campaign of destruction in Palestine. Over the past two years, Israel’s war machine has inflicted a scale of violence that human rights organizations, legal scholars, and global observers increasingly describe as genocidal. Entire families erased. Hospitals bombed. Children killed by the thousands. But somehow, it is the artists who are seen as the problem.

This grotesque inversion of priorities reveals not only the moral cowardice of Western powers, but also their deep complicity. Censorship of art has always been a tactic of control — a way to police public imagination and smother dissent. By silencing the musicians, filmmakers, poets, and protesters, the powerful hope to erase the truth and preserve the illusion of righteousness.

They blame the artists and activists — not the governments dropping bombs, not the corporations fueling climate collapse, not the regimes enforcing apartheid. Whether it’s the death spiral of capitalist greed or the slow suffocation of an entire people under occupation, it is never the system itself that is on trial. It’s the ones daring to scream about it.

But music, like protest, is not the disease — it is the symptom. A healthy world does not give rise to art filled with grief, fury, or desperation. Artists are not the danger. We are mirrors, echo chambers, warning signals. We document the collapse, and in doing so, we become targets.

What kind of world condemns chants more fiercely than child murder? What kind of society can stomach the sight of mass graves but trembles at a slogan shouted from a stage? It is a strange and deeply broken world — one where truth is punished, and silence is rewarded.

History will not remember the scolding op-eds or the canceled shows. It will remember the slaughter, and it will ask: Who spoke? Who sang? Who stayed silent?

And who tried to silence those who dared to speak?

The post Chants Are Not the Crime — Genocide Is first appeared on street art united states.
by Sami Wakim via street art united states