OPINION: The bland malevolence of Louis Theroux

It was something I saw coming, the inevitable platforming and normalisation of the disgraced musician Pascal Robinson-Foster from the punk group Bob Vylan by one of the UK’s most loved and respected interviewers, Louis Theroux.

For Jews in Britain, we have come to understand that no person, no institution, no national treasure is immune from minimising and softening the antisemitism and hatred targeted towards us.

I think it is fair to say that on no other planet would an otherwise unfamous artist who played a minor stage at Glastonbury, engaged in a hate-filled rant that invoked tropes about a minority group and called for the death of the only thing protecting that group from another Holocaust be invited to take part in a sanitised long-form interview by one of the nation’s most loved presenters and podcasters.

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And yet we know, as well as Pascal Robinson-Foster does, that he would never have landed an invitation to such a coveted hot seat if he hadn’t spewed hate about Jews to cheering crowds of the great unwashed middle-class festivalgoers who lapped it up gratuitously.

Jews not counting is, after all, an evergreen story and one that, over the last few years, has grown greener and greener. And it seems no one is immune from infection. Not even Theroux.

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A broadcaster famous for his immersive and often controversial documentaries, as well as his gentle and inquisitive style of questioning that is both disarming and exposing in the same stroke.

And yet, in his interview with Robinson-Foster, Theroux seemed more interested in providing his subject with helpful excuses. While he might like to think this is a nuanced sit-down with a controversial rapper who invoked tropes about Jewish music managers and called for death to the IDF, the interview only sanitises the explicit chant of violence.

When he asks Robinson-Foster what “death to the IDF means”, he asks the question back at him. Instead of saying “you were the one who said it on stage to thousands of people, surely you can explain what you mean”, Theroux engages in a painful, long-winded intro – “I guess my starting point is. I mean, we’ve got very different life experiences. I’m conscious of all the privilege I’ve enjoyed” – and finally coming to the conclusion that it probably means “an end to”, rather than a call for murderous violence. All Vylan has to say at the end is “let’s take that, I like that”, and then say that “death” and “IDF” rhyme. Theroux allows Bob to reframe the “Death to the IDF” chant as some kind of artistic metaphor or anti-oppression slogan — poetic resistance. Do me a favour.

The typical Theroux-style inquisition that might have ordinarily pressed on the real-world implications of such a saying – you know, just one being that the IDF includes conscripts and ordinary Israelis, not just a regime — is absent.

We can, as the conversation does, pin it all on semantics and pretend the “Death to the IDF” chant was some ethereal notion, but anyone with half a brain cell who heard that chant knows it was nothing other than a call that justified killing Jews and the only thing that stands as a protection of the Jewish people against another Holocaust.

Saying so does not, for one second, mean that one defends all or even part of the conduct of the IDF in the war in Gaza.

But Theroux decides to move on to the “media distraction” narrative. His attempts to lean into balance bring him to that famously calm and rational figure of the past two years, Owen Jones. He cites Jones while he puts it to Bob that the chant for killing was ineffective because it was, according to Jones, weaponised to distract from Israeli wrongdoing.

Never mind the frankly nonsensical idea that the world needed — let alone could be successfully distracted from, even for a moment — the most covered conflict of our time.

The result again is a moral flattening: Theroux helps present a world where two thoughts can no longer be held at the same time. Condemnation of a dehumanising chant can’t possibly be just that; critics of it can’t be genuine — they are only doing so as part of a political distraction.

At no point in the interview is Bob probed inquisitively about his Kanye-esque rantings made before the calls to kill. The trope-riddled tirade about a record label boss he used to work for is seemingly irrelevant to the interviewer, who is no stranger to interviewing conspiracists, racists and extremists.

Before his “Death to the IDF” chant, Robinson-Foster railed about a boss who had talked about Israel and had put his name to a letter urging Glastonbury to cancel Irish-language rap trio Kneecap’s performance.

Robinson-Foster said: “Who do I see on that list of names but that bald-headed [expletive] I used to work for? We’ve done it all, all right — from working in bars to working for [expletive] Zionists.”

When Robinson-Foster is asked about the spike in antisemitic incidents recorded by CST after his performance — with record numbers reported the next day — the presumably well-read and well-researched interviewer offers nothing in the way of challenge to Robinson-Foster’s suspicious, “What are they counting as antisemitic?”

Theroux offers no context, no mention of CST’s rigorous methodology or well-documented examples of attacks on Jews.

Instead, he offers an interesting phrase: “It was alleged that there was an uptick.”

A not-so-subtle casting of doubt on the verified data of a group that works day and night to protect the Jewish community from attacks like the one we saw in Manchester.

Like it or not, this aligns Theroux with the narrative of scepticism over Jewish safety concerns.

This matters because Theroux’s core audience includes a dedicated Gen Z fanbase in their 20s, the only group still silly enough to be at all interested in what Bob Vylan has to say, and a generation who, according to recent polling, includes one in ten 18–24-year-olds with a favourable view of Hamas. Forty-eight percent of the same group believe that Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews, which is antisemitic according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Definition of Antisemitism.

And once again, Jews are screaming. The normalisation of antisemitism doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens with the help and sanitisation of society’s most favoured and respected figures it infects everyone footballers, presenters, MPs, popular culture, to politics.

Louis is a smart man. He knows Jews in Britain have things to be scared of. He recorded the interview before the Manchester attack, but even before Jews were bludgeoned to death on the street, we had seen faeces smeared on synagogue doors, Jewish businesses targeted by arsonists, and Jews attacked in the street in the name of Palestine. Jewish children go to school behind armed guards and yet, in the interview with Robinson-Foster, Theroux frames Jewish fears as “nervousness”.

It is not nervousness that dictates whether Jewish schoolchildren are taught what to do when a terrorist breaks through their fortified gates and armed security. It is threat.