On Friday, September 12, Minister Vince Gasparro, the Parliamentary Secretary for Combatting Crime, publicly announced on X that the rap trio KNEECAP would not be allowed to enter Canada for their four upcoming shows in Vancouver and Toronto.
KNEECAP is an Irish-language rap trio comprised of Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, Naoise Ó Cairealláin and J. J. Ó Dochartaigh who use the stage names Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí, respectively. The group from West Belfast has risen to global prominence in part due to their award-winning eponymous film and outspoken solidarity with Palestine, most recently expressed in defiance of censorship at major festivals such as Coachella and Glastonbury.
It has been several weeks since Gasparro made the announcement, and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has not yet confirmed whether KNEECAP was actually banned at all. Samira Mohyeddin, a Toronto-based journalist, reported that Gasparro’s video had caused quite a stir within the Prime Minister’s Office, as he had no authorization to make that announcement in the first place.
KNEECAP, who were not actually informed themselves about the ban, has slammed the government in response saying that they will be taking legal action “against baseless accusations to silence our opposition to a genocide being committed by Israel.” Gasparro’s deplorable announcement came the same week as the United Nation’s report on the conduct of Israel in Gaza found that “Israel has committed genocide in Gaza” and that the state displayed “intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza.”
The spectre of KNEECAP is haunting the globe
KNEECAP has spearheaded a global resurgence of music that rages against the status quo. Recently, people across the world have rallied around Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh (stage name Mo Chara, meaning “my friend” in Irish), who has been accused of allegedly displaying a Hezbollah flag that was thrown onto the stage by a fan. Hundreds of supporters have attended his court hearings, which he has condemned as a nothing more than a distraction from Israel’s genocide in Palestine.
It is deeply ironic that the Canadian government seeks to lecture three working-class Irish artists from West Belfast about “political violence,” given Ireland’s centuries-long struggle under British rule. As Robbie McVeigh and Bill Rolston outline in Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution: Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh (Now the Summer is Coming), Ireland was not merely a colony but a “laboratory for the British Empire” where techniques of domination and dispossession were refined before being exported across the globe. From the Statutes of Kilkenny (1366), which outlawed the Irish language and customs, to the Penal Laws suppressing Catholic faith and assembly, and through to An Gorta Mór (The Great Famine) – a British-engineered catastrophe – Irish history reveals how empire manufactures both material deprivation and cultural annihilation.
KNEECAP’s emergence from the “Good Friday Generation” of the British-occupied North situates their art within this continuum of resistance. Their threat to power lies in their ability to politicize joy and community. Their Irish-language rap and musical expression is an act of decolonial reclamation and a revival of cultural identity long targeted for erasure. Their music speaks directly to working-class experience, translating complex histories of colonization and resistance into a language and energy that people feel in their bones. In doing so, they revive a radical tradition where music is a vehicle for political consciousness and solidarity.
Given the shared histories of occupation and state violence that link Ireland and Palestine, it is no surprise that Irish solidarity with Palestinian liberation is rooted in a legacy of resistance. KNEECAP’s steadfast support for Palestine thus embodies a broader recognition that the struggle for freedom in Gaza and the West Bank is inseparable from global movements against imperialism and capitalism. In this sense, their music articulates an internationalist politics of resistance: a rejection of the corporate capture of artists and an insistence that art remain inseparable from the material realities of oppression.
Empire’s decline
The Canadian government’s attempt to bar KNEECAP from entering the country is not an isolated bureaucratic decision, but part of a wider architecture of state control that targets voices challenging imperial consensus. When imperial legitimacy begins to fracture, the state’s first instinct is to tighten its grip on culture. Western governments increasingly rely on censorship and surveillance to maintain the crumbling illusion of moral authority. Canada, a settler-colonial state built on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, has long conflated dissent with threat, whether through the surveillance of Indigenous land defenders, the criminalization of pro-Palestine activism, or the repression of anti-capitalist movements.
The silencing of artists like KNEECAP exposes the hollowness of Canada’s liberal self-image as a defender of “freedom of expression”. As the gap widens between Canada’s proclaimed values (i.e. human rights, democracy, freedom) and its complicity in genocide and endless war, dissent becomes intolerable because it exposes the hypocrisy at the core of empire. Liberalism’s tolerance extends only as far as profit and geopolitical alignment permit. The moment art begins to speak the language of anti-imperialism, its creators are cast as threats to public order. The repression of artists like KNEECAP thus reveals a deeper insecurity: the empire fears its own reflection, and the possibility that ordinary people might finally see through the narrative scaffolding that has upheld its violence for generations.
Banning KNEECAP is not simply an attack on a single group of artists. It is symptomatic of a broader attempt by the powers that be to police the boundaries of acceptable speech around Palestine. As governments scramble to maintain and justify their complicity in Israel’s ongoing atrocities, every act of suppression only strengthens the networks of resistance that connect Belfast to Gaza, Toronto to Jenin.
The Palestine solidarity movement is only growing
Solidarity with Palestine is expanding across the globe, and Palestinian organizations continue to remind us of our collective power to materially confront apartheid through adherence to the principles of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), the same strategy that helped dismantle white supremacy in apartheid South Africa. As socialists from below, we organize where we are: within our families, our workplaces, our unions, and our local communities. History shows that we cannot “political will” our way out of genocide, nor can we depend on the Zionist-friendly Mark Carneys or Keir Starmers of the world to grant Palestinians their self-determination. Ending Israel’s settler-colonial project backed by U.S. imperialism and the global architecture of capital requires organized, material resistance from below.
The only real mechanism for change lies in organizing towards global working-class solidarity that propels a mass anti-war movement. It was precisely this kind of grassroots pressure that once pushed the Canadian state to withdraw from the Iraq War. Today, that same spirit is reemerging. Trade unionists in New Brunswick have voted to refuse handling arms shipments bound for Israel, organizers in Toronto meet weekly outside Dufferin Mall to leaflet about BDS actions, recently prompting a local NoFrills supermarket to drop Israeli products. Across Canada and around the world, artists, workers, and labour organizations are reminding us of our collective power to resist complicity. When the attempts to silence us from speaking out against Canada’s arms trade with a genocidal military are many, the sumud (steadfastness) and karama (dignity) of Palestinians guides our solidarity.
If the Canadian government’s aim was to silence KNEECAP, it could not have chosen a worse target. The group’s appeal has always rested on their unapologetic political clarity and their refusal to dilute their message for mainstream acceptance. Far from isolating them, the attempted ban has only amplified their platform and drawn new listeners to their music and politics.
In an era when much of popular culture is stripped of political content, KNEECAP’s authenticity has made them irresistible to the masses. Their rise in the face of censorship is proof that the more the state attempts to suppress voices of dissent, the more it exposes its own failings and fuels the very movements it seeks to contain. Rather than marginalizing KNEECAP, Canada’s actions have only helped transform them into a global symbol of resistance.
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