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Justice for Macklemore

The rapper has been dumped from Ed Sheeran’s tour for saying “free Palestine.” That’s a disgrace.

American rapper Macklemore performs live on stage during the Lollapalooza Paris Festival on July 19, 2025, in Paris, France.

Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, friend of Donald Trump, and proud mega-donor to AIPAC, just showed us once again how raw oligarchical power can crush any pretense that our speech is protected by the First Amendment.

Bob Kraft is the person primarily responsible, as he readily admits, for compelling international music superstar Ed Sheeran to drop his opening act, hip-hop artist Macklemore, from his stadium tour. Macklemore’s crime was saying two simple words at a previous tour stop to rapturous cheers: “Free Palestine.” Kraft proceeded to tell Sheeran that if Macklemore stayed on the bill, his sold-out show at Gillette stadium—where the Patriots play and which Kraft owns (and for which he received millions in public money)—would be canceled. When pop musician Pink wrote on her Instagram that Macklemore’s invocation of “Free Palestine” made her feel “scared ” as a Jewish person, Kraft stepped in and rallied other stadium owning billionaires to make the same threat. As a result, Sheeran threw Macklemore under the bus and removed him from the rest of his tour.

Macklemore has issued a formal response to all of this—and people should read the whole statement. It says in part:

I am not a victim. Ed Sheeran is not a victim. Pink is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families. The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women and children who have been killed, starved, displaced and forced to live through unimaginable violence. People are being killed today, and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don’t lose sight of that.

I am not a victim. Ed Sheeran is not a victim. Pink is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families. The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women and children who have been killed, starved, displaced and forced to live through unimaginable violence. People are being killed today, and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don’t lose sight of that.

There is much to unpack here. First, as a Jewish person myself, I’d like to point out that the true antisemite in this drama is Bob Kraft. He uses his billions to prop up the idea that Jewishness is synonymous with supporting the Israeli state and, therefore, that it’s antisemitic to have any opinion other than the defense of a 78-year-old colonial territory and its total war on the people of Gaza. That people like Kraft and Pink insist that to be Jewish definitionally means to be a Zionist, even though there are more Christian Zionists in the United States than there are Jews, is utterly antisemitic. This false equivalence........

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