“The (State Department) has revoked the US visas for the members of the Bob Vylan band in light of their hateful tirade at Glastonbury, including leading the crowd in death chants. Foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said in a post on X Monday.
A senior State Department official told The Daily Wire that it is “already looking at revocation” of their visas ahead of its US tour. “As a reminder, under the Trump Administration, the U.S. government will not issue visas to any foreigner who supports terrorists,” the senior official said.
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Bob Vylan’s visa revoked
Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said that the United States has “revoked the US visas for the members of the Bob Vylan band in light of their hateful tirade at Glastonbury, including leading the crowd in death chants.” It comes after the band were dropped by their talent agency following their anti-IDF chant at the music festival. The group was slated to go on a US tour beginning in late October, according to a post on Instagram.
The US State Department has instituted an aggressive visa restriction and revocation policy for alleged support of terrorism and anti-Semitism with US President Donald Trump’s administration aggressively revoking visas, mostly of students, over anti-Israel activism.
The punk rock band sparked a massive controversy by getting a crowd singing “death to the IDF” live on the BBC in the UK. The music duo from London stunned viewers of the Glastonbury Festival coverage by launching into a tirade against the war in Gaza and the actions of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The BBC has said it regrets not pulling the live stream of the “unacceptable” Glastonbury set, with Ofcom saying the broadcaster had “questions to answer”.
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Before leading their audience into a chant during their set on Saturday a message their screen on stage switched to flash a message that read, “Free Palestine United Nations have called it a genocide. The BBC calls it a ‘conflict.'”
They then directed their fans to repeat after them, stating “Death to the IDF” and “Free Palestine.”
Singer Bobby Vylan concluded his chant, “From the river to the sea Palestine must be, will be, free.” The performance came as a response to the BBC preventing the following act from making a controversial move on live television.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned the group’s “appalling hate speech”. The controversy comes after a protracted dispute over another act at Glastonbury, politically charged Belfast hip-hop group Kneecap, who sharply criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza when performing in April at the Coachella festival in California.
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In a Sunday Instagram post captioned “I said what I said,” Bobby Vylan said he had received “messages of both support and hatred” following the performance. “Teaching our children to speak up for the change they want and need is the only way that we make this world a better place,” the post read. “As we grow older and our fire possibly starts to dim under the suffocation of adult life and all its responsibilities, it is incredibly important that we inspire future generations to pick up the torch that was passed to us.”
Glastonbury rebuffed pressure, including from Starmer, to remove Kneecap from the roster but the BBC did not stream Kneecap’s performance.
Both Kneecap and Bob Vylan, who also played Coachella, had dates scheduled for later this year in the United States.
The Israeli Embassy in the UK said it was “deeply disturbed” by what it called “inflammatory and hateful” rhetoric at the festival.
A BBC spokesperson told CNN Sunday that some of the comments made during Vylan’s performance were “deeply offensive.” The broadcaster streamed the rapper’s set live but said it had no plans to make the performance available on demand through its iPlayer streaming platform.
On Monday, the BBC admitted that “with hindsight” Vylan’s performance should have been pulled from air during the performance, saying that the corporation “respects freedom of expression but stands firmly against incitement to violence.”
“The antisemitic sentiments expressed by Bob Vylan were utterly unacceptable and have no place on our airwaves,” it added.
