The Sziget Festival is a staple of the European festival calendar every year. This time, however, in addition to global A-list artists such as Post Malone, Kid Cudi, and Charli XCX, the organizers also got a very controversial act on the marquee: the Northern Irish hip hop group Kneecap.
As we have covered earlier, Kneecap is known for their explicit support for Palestine, and even the Islamist terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
In response, more than 130 Hungarian musicians and other artists have signed an open letter in which they condemn the inclusion of the hip hop group in the popular festival’s line-up.
According to the artists who have signed onto the initiative, the band is not speaking out for the rights of the Palestinian people, but for the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah. They recall that Kneecap publicly praised the attacks by Hamas on 8 October 2023, the day after the terrorist attack on Israel at the Nova Festival, and has continued to do so regularly at its performances since then.
The 7 October attacks on the Nova Festival alone resulted in 378 deaths.
Among the signatories are Oscar-, Golden Globe- and Kossuth Prize-winning film director László Nemes Jeles, musician Gábor Presser, Kossuth Prize-winning actor and comedian János Gálvölgyi, fellow hip hop artist Péter ‘Majka’ Majoros, and singer Kati Wolf.
‘The national artistic community is diverse. We have our disagreements, we see the world differently, but we all agree that there is no place for incitement and hate speech among us. We find it unacceptable and we protest that Sziget, hiding behind the false guise of inclusion and freedom of expression, invites a band whose values run counter to the festival's decades-long tradition,’ the open letter reads.
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