ENTERTAINER VYBZ Kartel came under attack, but it was not in court or in the jail cell where he has been spending time for the last 30 months.

Pastor of New Haven Seventh-day Adventist Church, Holland Thompson, ripped into dancehall music and names associated with entertainers that he said incited violence and criminality.

Delivering the sermon at the funeral for slain Dunrobin Primary School teacher, 32-year-old Janice Atkinson Reid, Holland yesterday urged the Government to expunge Kartel’s music.

While specifically fingering Kartel, whose real name is Adidja Palmer, for delivering “cacophonous and disruptive and violent” lyrics, Thompson suggested that it was high time Government move boldly against music containing violent lyrics.

“If I could get to talk to the Prime Minister (Portia Simpson Miller) and the culture minister (Lisa Hanna), I would make it known to them that the music has brought murder into the psyche of our people and must be erased and expunged from our nation.”

Reid was found strangled to death and had multiple stab wounds to her body on January 29 at her Portsmouth Home in Portmore, St Catherine.

Thompson declared that Jamaica has been transformed into a culture of murder and lamented that in spite of the fact that the country is blessed with numerous churches, the island was still deemed by many to be the murder capital of the world. He also hit out at names dancehall entertainers ascribe to themselves such as ‘Bounty Killa’, ‘Merciless’ and ‘Assassin.’ He declared that these names connote violence if the dictionary meanings are anything to go by.

Thompson charged that dancehall music is negatively affecting the society. “It is rough, it is not refined, it is crude and it is murderous,” he declared.