Palestine, music and censorship with Lowkey | The Electronic Intifada Podcast

On episode 32 of The Electronic Intifada Podcast, rapper, activist and all-round renaissance man Lowkey joins Asa and Nora to talk about:
- The purge of anti-Zionist academics from UK institutions
- Islamophobia and the Israel lobby’s role in promoting it
- The role of artists in defending Palestinian rights
- The state of the corporate music industry
- What he did in the years he took time off music
- Drill, a hip-hop genre with a bad reputation
And much more.

Lowkey has always used his music to support the things he believes in: not least the cause of Palestinian liberation.
He talks about the price of speaking out on these issues: being censored and marginalized.
“They do make you pay,” he says, “when you land blows, you then do suffer a consequence whether it’s just algorithmically, whether it’s in terms of association, whether it’s in terms of who will or won’t put you on their show – and that’s within the left, let alone in wider mainstream British society.”
Along with championing social justice issues in the UK and beyond, Lowkey has been a vocal critic of the Labour Party’s failure to stop the Israel lobby’s false allegations of anti-Semitism over the past several years.
“The internal surveillance system of the Labour party was conspiring to lose the election,” Lowkey says.
“We underestimated those functions of the establishment.”
Video production by Tamara Nassar
Theme music by Sharif Zakout
Source: The Electronic Intifada