(Apartheid) In the name of love

Behind Bono's lust for empire

We expect warmongers like Hillary Clinton, wife to another warmonger, to delight in accepting the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honour, from another warmonger. But for Bono to do so, someone who has spent much of his life purporting to be an advocate for peace, has caused outrage worldwide.

His band, U2, are one of the biggest of all time, having sold 170 million albums worldwide and won 22 Grammy Awards.

He is the writer of lyrics such as:

“One life with each other
Sisters, brothers
One life, but we're not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other
One
One”

And:

”Jesus can you take the time
To throw a drowning man a line
Peace on Earth
To tell the ones who hear no sound
Whose sons are living in the ground
Peace on Earth.”

In “(Pride) In the name of love” Bono’s lyrics pay homage to Martin Luther King Jr., the American champion for civil rights, equality, and peace.

But, since October 7 2023, Bono has not said one word about the plight of the Palestinian people. And, he actually helped Israel in how he chose to frame the Hamas October 7 2023 act of rebellion against Palestine’s oppressors, whether intentionally or not.

Bono is acutely aware of how the British government and media establishment concocted and wielded propaganda as a devastating weapon against the people of Ireland.

He is also known for prancing around with politicians like former US president George W. Bush and former UK prime minister Tony Blair, who invaded Iraq together, which led to the deaths of over one million Iraqi civilians.

And here he is bizarrely getting a Las Vegas crowd to chant the name of Alexei Navalny, the late Russian opposition leader, who espoused such peace-loving beliefs like that all Muslims were cockroaches, Russians should carry guns, and that central Asians living in Russia should be expelled en masse.

Bono and U2 guitarist, the Edge, made millions by selling their Dublin hotel, the Clarence. This deal was made possible with a loan of over $45 million by Leumi, an Israeli bank, to the buyers. Leumi has financed the illegal settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Bono has also invested in an Israeli startup, UBQ Materials.

U2 and the band’s long-time manager, Paul McGuinness went their separate ways in 2013. McGuinness’ replacement was Guy Oseary, an Israeli-American born in Jerusalem, who has regularly regurgitated zionist propaganda and attended fundraisers for the Israeli Genocide Forces. U2 split with Oseary in 2022 and replaced him with Full Stop Management, which is run by pro-Israel duo Irving Azoff and his son, Jeffrey Azoff.

So, the band has been under the direction of zionist management for over a decade. Then there is Bono’s bizarre promotion of American imperial interests, from culture-washing George W. Bush’s bellicose presidential administration to forcing concertgoers who paid hundreds or even thousands of dollars to see U2 to chant the name of the Russian man with xenophobic, far-right beliefs that the United States wanted to be Russian president. And then there is his silence when the United States and its outpost in the Middle East, Israel, commit a genocide.

Bono lives in Dublin. Well, at least some of the time, given his globetrotting. Despite the best efforts of Ireland’s mainstream media to downplay the ubiquity and unrelenting nature of the country’s vocal support for Palestine, it is next to impossible not to see and hear it, across the country. The chances of Bono being ignorant to the massive support in Ireland for Palestine are next to zero, especially given his history of speaking about social issues too.

One more thing which people who aren’t U2 fans may not be aware of: Bono has always been obsessed with the United States. Imperial entertainment representative, Jimmy Kimmel, even joked that U2 loved America more than 99% percent of Americans.

The band’s iconic album, the Joshua Tree, is generally regarded to essentially be an American album by an Irish band. He wrote a song called “The Hands that Built America”. In the song, “Bullet the Blue Sky”, he says “America” four times. He has talked about America the “idea”, as he put it, on a separate occasion. And for some reason only known to himself, he has an odd tendency, or a nervous tic perhaps, to randomly shout “USA” or “America” at concerts. And yes, it is as cringeworthy as it sounds, if you have been lucky enough not to witness it.

I can’t shake the idea that he has been actively working for the American government for years now, and that his reward is the continued trappings of fame and fortune, and imperial recognition for his efforts, like Biden’s Presidential Medal of Freedom. That and/or he has been compromised somehow, honey-trapped into obedience to the dictats of the ruling elites. I mean, he hasn’t even said “ceasefire now” over the last 15 months, the choice phrase for celebrities who are afraid to speak up for fear of career consequences but want to say something. I don’t rule out the possibility that celebrities are threatened with consequences for their family members if they do not do as they are told. Perhaps his actress daughter, Eve Hewson, may find her roles suddenly dry up were her father to veer from the imperial script and speak out against the US-Israeli genocide. But this is mere conjecture.

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From what we can know, for someone who has built a career in large part on the image of advancing peace and non-violence, who sings about peace, love, and Jesus Christ, and who condemned Hamas after October 7 as though October 7 happened in a vacuum, and who comes from a country that resisted colonialist oppression and settler colonialism, Bono’s silence about the genocide of the people of Gaza and his continued shilling for empire has made his hypocrisy clearer than ever, for all the world to see.