It is hard not to be excited at the very public shaming of a major celebrity, pop star Ed Sheeran, over his agreement to remove a friend and support act, Macklemore, from his current US tour. During his set, Macklemore spoke out eloquently against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
This feels like a very belated turning-point. During the three years of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, the corporate world has maintained its grip over the West’s cultural spaces – in part, to conceal its own complicity in those crimes.
Now that chokehold has been exposed – and it looks every bit as ugly as, indeed, it is.
Might the backlash against Macklemore’s treatment be a sign that the dam is finally about to burst?
During two appearances on Sheeran’s tour, Macklemore expressed opposition to Israel’s genocide before an audience of many tens of thousands. He called out “Free Palestine!” as he performed a song, Hind’s Hall, inspired by the Israeli military’s notorious, and cold-blooded, murder of a six-year girl, Hind Rajab, in Gaza.
As a result, Robert Kraft, the owner of one of the stadiums for an upcoming date on the tour, refused to host Macklemore. The billionaire appears to have organised a boycott by other venues.
Kraft is known to be close to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, currently sought by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in starving Gaza’s population. At an awards ceremony honouring Kraft in 2019, Netanyahu noted: “Israel does not have a more loyal friend.”
Shameful hypocrisy
Sheeran caved in the face of Kraft’s corporate diktat, justifying his decision by saying he had a policy of not “taking sides” on political matters in his professional life. There are all-too-evident problems with his claim.
First, the musician has repeatedly taken sides in major political matters, not least in showing support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.
His cancelling of Macklemore makes sense only if Sheeran believes the vast scale of suffering in Gaza is of much less significance than the more limited suffering in Ukraine. Even on the most conservative estimate possible, 30 children have been killed in Gaza for every child killed in Ukraine.
Sheeran risks looking not just like he’s applying a double standard but like he’s engaging in outright anti-Palestinian racism.
Why did “apolitical” Sheeran feel impelled to speak out himself in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, but now feels impelled to stop others from speaking out in solidarity with the people of Gaza? Cowardice barely suffices to explain his shameful hypocrisy.
Second, in agreeing to Macklemore’s removal from the tour, Sheeran has not avoided taking a side. He has very clearly taken a side – the side of billionaire Kraft, Israel’s most “loyal friend”, in ensuring yet again a voice against genocide is denied a major platform.
As the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu observed in relation to the apartheid regime of South Africa: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
And third, to defend Macklemore, Sheeran did not need to get directly involved in the “politics” of what he calls the Israel-Palestine “conflict”. He could simply have backed his friend on the grounds of artistic freedom.
After all, Sheeran gave Macklemore a spot on the tour, knowing full well that one of his most famous songs – one he was almost certain to perform – was Hind’s Hall. Sheeran knew that it would be impossible for Macklemore to avoid politics on the tour because Macklemore’s music is political.
Financial muscle
Sheeran had a choice to defend a fellow artist’s freedom. And he chose not to do so.
He is now being harshly judged for that – not least by his own backing band and other support acts. They all pulled out of the tour in solidarity with Macklemore. Unlike Sheeran, they understood what was at stake.
One, Aaron Rowe, an Irish musician, noted of his reasoning:
I cannot stand by and allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence the rightful voices of those who speak up against Israeli genocide and who highlight the savage murder of children. I would lose all respect for myself to carry on as normal.
That is a lesson Sheeran may be belatedly grasping. After three years of genocide, we are seeing the first signs of a welcome fissure open up between political and economic power, on one side, and social and cultural power on the other.
Earlier acts of protests against genocide by musicians – such as by Kneecap and Bob Vylan – have received plenty of publicity, but overwhelmingly negative coverage from an establishment media as steeped in complicity for the genocide as the West’s politicians and billionaire class.
The row embroiling Sheeran, however, has so far moved in a different direction, with the media colouring their reports in grey rather than the usual black and white.
Part of the reason is that, despite claims by Kraft and the Israel lobby that Macklemore’s remarks to concert-goers were antisemitic, the media are struggling this time to find anything they can misrepresent as offensive. And without such a distraction, they cannot deflect their audiences from drawing the obvious inference: that a pro-Israel billionaire has crushed First Amendment free-speech rights through sheer financial muscle.
The usual lobbyists claiming that Macklemore’s exclamation of “Free Palestine!” is antisemitic and poses a threat to Jews are simply hollowing out their own credibility, further undermining Sheeran’s vacuous “apolitical” stance, and bolstering Macklemore.
After three years of Gaza being levelled, its children bombed, its survivors eking out a living among the rubble, only an idiot or liar fails to see that Palestine urgently needs liberating.
Even the West’s complicit political class are saying, in effect, “Free Palestine!” every time they call for a two-state solution – though, of course, in their case, they do not really have any intention of freeing the Palestinians from Israel’s decades-long illegal occupation.
No fog of war
But there is another reason Macklemore, unlike his predecessors, is gaining an edge in the coverage of his battle against Kraft and Sheeran.
The truth of the Gaza genocide has become impossible to hide, even for the so-called legacy media. Years of omissions, equivocations and lies by the corporate news machine helped Israel get most of the way through the erasure of Gaza, if not yet the expulsion of its people.
For months the dust has been settling, both figuratively and literally. Claims about the fog of war – always bogus – can no longer be credibly wielded by Israel or the news media.
There is no battle to free the Israeli hostages – justifying all the “collateral damage” of many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian children – because there are no hostages in Gaza.
There is no meaningful fight against Hamas because Israel has once again managed to pen the people of Gaza into a concentration camp – this one only a third of the size of their original tiny concentration camp.
And, of course, Israel has been stripped of even a pretend-excuse for excluding foreign journalists from Gaza. Transparently, the only reason they are being kept out is Israel’s fear of making the horrors there visible firsthand to the western media.
Gaza is slowly moving from the daily news cycle into the history books. There, it will be remembered not as a war but as a genocide.
In response, the western establishment – its politicians and media – are slowly reinventing their positions to avoid being too obviously on the wrong side of history.
That was evident in the British government’s recent decision, very late in the day, to support the International Court of Justice’s 2024 ruling that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is unlawful.
The UK is now promising to do the bare minimum to accord with that judgment by imposing sanctions on Israel’s illegal settlements over their part in ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank – though not, mind, on Israel itself for establishing those settlements.
Likewise, the news media is putting a little more critical distance between itself and Israel.
As coverage of the Macklemore-Sheeran bust-up suggests, that crack offers a chance, and one that needs to be exploited.
Cowardice shamed
For the first time, Sheeran’s public shaming shows there may be a price to pay for demonstrating cowardice on the issue of genocide.
That is important. For three years, the billionaire class that rule over us have used the blunt instrument of their financial muscle – force – to dominate not only the political discourse about Gaza but the cultural one too.
The billionaires – the Robert Krafts – own the platforms on which our cultural life is expressed: the legacy media, social media, Hollywood, music labels, publishing houses, venues, and so on.
They use that power to great effect, to prevent any real criticism of the neoliberal capitalist order that enriches them, of the war industries they own that levelled Gaza, of the empire they built that endlessly pillages others’ resources and is rapidly undermining the conditions for life on the planet.
Their stranglehold over our cultural spaces, enforcing a silence against the genocide, is designed to encourage fans to assume that artists and celebrities have little sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinians and reject the idea that Israel is carrying out a genocide.
In a western culture where, rightly or wrongly, large parts of the public see their preferred artists and celebrities as role models, and often look to them for guidance, this enforced silence is exploited by the ruling class as its alibi for inaction.
The cost of pointing out what we can all see in Gaza has been simply too high: no chance of that first big break; calls unreturned; lost work; cancelled contracts; antisemitism smears.
In short, pariahdom.
Macklemore may finally have chipped away at that calculation. In his confrontation with Sheeran, he comes out smelling of roses – and Sheeran emerges as a snivelling toad.
Billionaires punishing artists for taking an honourable stance against genocide – as has happened with actors such as Susan Sarandon and Melissa Barrera, and musicians such as Zarah Larsson and CMAT – has a purpose. It is intended to send a powerful message to others that they should keep their heads down.
Now Sheeran’s shaming has sent a counter-message to his fellow creatives. Being pimped by the billionaires in support of genocide is a bad look.
The billionaire class’s grip is weakening. We must keep prising its fingers off our throats until it is only the discredited, and the morally bankrupt, who refuse to speak loudly in opposition to genocide.
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
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The search for justice never ends! The Hind Rajab Foundation is tracking down Israeli criminals, and bringing them to justice. This is vital in the effort to hold Israel accountable. May they also turn their sights on the criminal leaders of the countries of the west who are co-perpetrators of these crimes.
Find out what they’re doing here:
https://www.hindrajabfoundation.org
The least we can do is donate to help them:
Support the Hind Rajab Foundation
https://donate.stripe.com/cN228hbY5g7jaM84gg
MintPress News report:
Irish Classic Hits Radio Have Decided To Stop Playing Ed Sheeran Songs Following Complaints
The public reaction in Ireland to the decision to drop Macklemore from the Loop Tour has triggered the removal of Sheeran’s music amidst widespread calls for a boycott of his songs & concerts altogether.
https://t.me/mintpress_news/15618