Context about the booking of Holocausts at the Bike Wars event at K-Town Hardcore Fest 2025
We’d like to share some context about the booking of Holocausts at the Bike Wars event. If you were expecting to hear from us on this matter sooner, apologies for that – we have a lot on our plates as a collective and it requires quite a bit of time to reach consensus on important matters.
The organising and booking of Bike Wars is done by the ‘K-Town Bike Wars’ collective. They function as an autonomous collective separate from ours. We decided to let Bike Wars speak for themselves in this matter. In hindsight, given that they’re promoted within our wider festival, perhaps we should have said something as well.
We acknowledge that seeing a band from occupied Palestine / Isra*l on the lineup can raise concerns. The crucial distinction here is that Holocausts are outspoken active anti-Zionists and have been for a long time. The band members have resisted the Isra*li terror state in every way they can – from refusing army service to protesting apartheid – and they use their music to challenge the occupation and rally for resistance. Some members have left the Occupied Palestinian Territories and are now living in Europe; others are struggling to leave because of their Arab background and the systemic discrimination they face. This is why the band requested us to leave any city or country label off the poster.
We acknowledge the feeling of “bad timing” regarding the booking, but we hope that people can see that Holocausts is a voice of dissent, and not a danger. For us, it’s not about where someone was born – it’s about where they stand and act. We fully support the BDS movement and the call for a cultural boycott of Isra*l – one that targets complicity, not identity.
We have tried addressing the following before, but the reason we aren’t engaging in comments here is not that we wish to ignore or silence valid criticism or concerns. We do not have the time or capacity, as a group, to engage in the comment section of our posts. We almost never do that. We are not ignoring anything posted here, but we acknowledge why it can be interpreted like that. We read everything and bring it to our meetings, because that’s how our collective works and we will not be changing that. Not everyone in our collective is on social media, so for transparency within our group, decisions and opinions are agreed upon, primarily at physical meetings – meetings that happen weekly/bi-weekly. We appreciate that our hard-working volunteer collective members need to switch off from the “always on” internet culture which has become so omnipresent.
We appreciate comments and criticism made in good faith. We embrace dialogue, over everything. And while we would like to debate things and also have our views challenged, we simply do not operate at the speed that the internet requires of us. On top of that, we are not a professional enterprise – we are a 100% volunteer run festival. We organize and run this together, in our spare time.
We also need to stress that listening to our critics, reading what is being said and trying to understand perspectives, doesn’t necessarily mean that we agree with the approach that is being laid out. We are, as a group and as people, part of a large and diverse political movement in Copenhagen. And we lean on our political comrades here when we make decisions.
In the rare case that a comment section turns vicious, we can see that we are no longer platforming constructive debates, but rather hatred and damaging opinions that do not align with the values of our common space. This means that we sometimes have to take a step back and draw a line under the vitriol being thrown around. Not because we want to silence our critics, but because we don’t want to platform blatant zionism, racism and doxxing that could cause actual physical harm.
We are not unbooking Holocausts. We believe that it is wrong to cancel someone because of the place they come from – that is not the way we operate. We believe that the band is an important voice of dissent and that their politics are very clear. They accept their responsibility, having grown up on occupied land, and use the platform they have, to spread awareness and to criticise and speak out against the atrocities being committed against the Palestinian people. Not just today, but for a long time. And we support that.
This will be the last statement we make on this matter before the festival.
We will not be leaving the comment section open, simply because we do not have the resources to moderate in a meaningful way. We have a festival to plan – and we hope to see you all here!