BY BRINN SMITH
Recently, music artist Macklemore has been a hot topic because of pro-Palestinian comments made on stage at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
He was then dropped from Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour as an opener, due to the owners of multiple venues, most notably billionaire Robert Kraft, accusing him of being antisemetic, telling the producers of the Loop Tour that they would be unable to play at their venues if Macklemore was on the set list.
Ed Sheeran capitulated to them, and as a result, lost all of his openers, who all dropped out in solidarity with Macklemore and his message, as well as his band, who are all Irish and cited the genocide of their people at the hands of the imperial British empire as their reason for dropping out.
Sheeran then proceeded to “apologize” at one of his following shows, while (in my opinion) clearly reading from a teleprompter, telling him what to say.
In the “apology,” Sheeran said that he never wanted to be a “political artist,” though to me, that falls on deaf ears. I am a firm believer that if you either stay silent or capitulate to the aggressor in a dynamic, you are siding with the aggressor.
This time is especially bad. Robert Kraft is a billionaire, one who is accused of being in the Epstein files and who has done publicity photo shoots with Benjamin Netanyahu after the livestreaming of Israel’s genocide began, which, to me at the very least, is unforgivable.
Ed Sheeran is a multimillionaire, one who would almost certainly have enough power to deny Kraft and his ilk of shoving someone like Macklemore, who has been friends with him for a very long time, off his tour. In this case, silence is an endorsement.
In all of this, Macklemore has continued to be the bigger person, publicly saying that he doesn’t want his message to get lost in the commotion, reiterating that he, Ed Sheeran, and artist P!nk, are not victims, and that the real victims are still the Palestinian people, which is a sentiment that I appreciate.
He also announced that he was going to donate $1 million dollars to pro-Palestinian causes, and he challenged Robert Kraft to do the same.
The artist that I just brought up, P!nk, is a pro-Israel musician, who reposted a video of Macklemore’s “Free Palestine” speech originaly posted by the account “Stop Antisemetism.”
Along with the post, she insinuated that to be against Zionism, the movement that says that Jewish people have an ancient right to the land that Palestinians occupy, and thus justifies the extermination of them, is the same as being Antisemetic, which is the hatred or bigotry against people of Jewish faith.
I have never understood this argument. Jewish people are not a monolith. There are many Anti-Zionist Jewish people, just as there are many Christian Zionists.
The conflating of both of those terms seems so dangerous to me, as someone who is Anti-Zionist, but does not view Jewish people as the cause of it. I do not have any hatred for people who practice Judaism, just as I have no hatred for people who practice Islam or Christianity.
I do have a problem with the nation-state of Israel that is committing atrocity after atrocity to defenseless Palestinians and killing children daily.
All of this to say, punishing Macklemore for speaking his values, then misrepresenting what he said is infuriating, and I believe is indicative of how the powerful get to act.
A billionaire gets to silence an artist’s platform just because he wants to, and the headlining artist just takes a back seat and acts as though he has no blame in it all.
It’s infuriating, and I’m at the very least hopeful that the rhetoric surrounding the genocide starts to change soon, moreso than it already has.
Larger media outlets are still hesitant to call it genocide, despite the legal definition and all of the scholarly work done to prove its designation.
Palestinian people do not deserve to be killed en masse, and they certainly deserve to be recognized as victims in this atrocity. Free Palestine.
