this has piqued my interest, so went and I read all his interviews, which I recommend – they only take 15 minutes to get through and all his beliefs are right there.
I wrote up some of my thoughts. Tl; dr – yeah, he was basically a guy in a room in Manchester who was in love with Hamas
first, MG basically viewed Muslims as a single entity, differentiated only by their level of resistance to the West (e.g. Iran>Baathist Iraq>Kuwait) and especially Israel. This explains some of the stranger parts of his politics. Like: how he was so opposed to Western interference in Muslim lands but perfectly fine with Muslims intervening in each other’s affairs, i.e. Iran in WB/Gaza; why he was able to support Iran during the Iran-Iraq War – even call for it to annex Iraq – but later support Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on irredentist grounds*; why an avowedly irreligious Westerner so heavily favored Islamists and repressive theocracies – they’re virtually always more hostile to the West/Israel, and possibly he also saw them as representing a more pure, non-Westernized Islamic culture.
his larger concern was the removal of all foreign influence – theoretically as a general principle but virtually always in reference to the West (and earlier USSR) in Muslim lands – to allow national self-determination (“what the people want”). clearly it would be ridiculous to dispute the fact of hypocritical, self-serving Western meddling in the ME. however, making resistance to the West your only criteria leads, eventually, to supporting very nasty regimes or groups, as MG became an apologist for Iran, Islamist atrocities in the Algerian Civil War, the Taliban, etc. he also had little if any understanding of the inner dynamics (tribal, ethnic, etc) of the places he was talking about and a poorly defined notion of self-determination – more like whoever seizes power once foreign influence is removed.
MG’s willful ignorance is one of the weirdest things about him. it seems almost like a conscious point of pride, i.e. “I work from the heart”, but at the same time he always refers to his music as coming from “political facts”. In fact he claims these political facts are the only influence on his music. you’d think a man so interested in facts would make an effort to learn more of them, but, I guess not.
unsurprisingly MG had something of a persecution complex. he both disdained the need for recognition and complained that he was being ignored b/c of his views. there’s an insinuation, both from him and fans, of a lone voice in Zionist media dominated wilderness to speaking truth to power. it would be too simple to draw a direct parallel from MG to Islamist and Shiite martyrdom but at the same time there’s something there, as well the fanaticism you often see in adult converts to any religion or cause.
everything else about MG is, anyway, far secondary to Isr/Pal, his position on which can be summed up as; 100% against Israel, all problems are solely Israel’s fault, all tactics of resistance are justified, unconditional support to PLO/Hamas/IJ, no compromise until Israel’s total defeat and expulsion. this is, afaik, basically Hamas’s own position, except possibly more extreme since MG didn’t allow for compromise under any circumstances no matter the Israeli concessions. He did, despite dedicating “Betrayal” to Arafat, come to embrace a Provo style Kalashnikov + ballot box (or, mediated negotiation) strategy – whatever worked, so long as it lead to the end of Israel and Palestinian liberation. I do appreciate his honesty about his views, that he never sugarcoated anything. You’d hard be hard-pressed to find many Westerners, even among the most fervent supporters of Palestinian liberation, who’d unequivocally embrace suicide bombing and killing civilians.
was he an anti-Semite? or, recognizing that as a misnomer, was he anti-Jewish in a bigoted sense, in addition to or as a part of his anti-Zionism? He never made any overtly anti-Jewish statements and though he was VERY forthright about killing Israelis it was always in the context of liberation struggle and retribution for Israeli actions. however, he also denied the existence of any good Israelis, i.e. “the whole people are disgusting” (presumably not including Arab Israelis). It’s not an exaggeration to describe his fixation on Israel (which he invariably called “the vile regime) as pathological, and it’s difficult not to sense something ugly lurking beneath the surface. absolutely, I’d distinguish him from Holocaust deniers or whatever, but I do think his feelings about Israel were so strong they may have gradually bled over into prejudice. put it this way – he’s not the best example to cite when you’re arguing for the difference between anti-Zionism and (as commonly defined) anti-Semitism.
one other thing that has to be mentioned is the guy’s amazing prescience. he was basically dead-on about the rise of protracted global jihad (and the West’s role in that rise), something tons of Arabists, security types and other experts totally whiffed on. granted, he viewed it in terms of general anti-Western resistance rather than fundamentalist theology, but still, as far back as the mid-80s, with everyone else still mired in the Cold War, MG was envisioning an endless, all-consuming struggle in the ME that would suck in huge portions of the world, extraterritorial jihadist networks, popular movements toppling Arab dictators. whether it’s just history coinciding with his ideology or he really had some deep intuitive understanding I have no idea, maybe some of both. what he didn’t foresee was that war, revolution and jihadi struggle would actually lead, not to pan-Islamism, but to balkanization and erosion of national sovereignty in the Arab world. it’s not hard to imagine what his take on things like the U.S. invasions or the Western-backed toppling of his hero Gadhafi would’ve been, but there’s absolutely no way shoehorn the multi-sided, by proxy, DRC-style nightmare Syria has become into any Islam vs. foreign oppression narrative.
*i.e. that Kuwait is an artificial creation of the British that historically was a part of Iraq (how accurate this is I don’t know) and thus Iraq had a right to take it back