Remaining apolitical
Ed Sheeran, the singer-songwriter, wants to remain apolitical. No stand is a stand.
Apolitical is a stand. It stands for safety. It stands for the desire to be loved by all. To not rock boats.
Nice and safe and apolitical in a world on fire is only a temporary illusion of safety. Silence makes us complicit. Prolonged silence against terrible crimes makes us advocates of terrible crimes. When you know something evil is happening and you look away, you say yes to the evil. It is the enduring story of history. The people of Germany did it. We have all done it, to some degree.
What did you do when you knew? This is a question of morality. Of our humanity. This question asks who we really are when we reach a threshold moment, and things get wobbly.
The trouble is, by choosing to end his engagement with Macklemore, Ed Sheeran has become political. He chose. He capitulated to pressure. Is it an act of cowardice, or perhaps greed, or even the unrequited need to be loved and adored by everyone? Whatever the reason, he knew who he had invited to open his concert. He knew Macklemore’s stance before he hired him.
If you listen to Macklemore’s speech on the Ed Sheeran stage, you will hear that he stands for not killing children in the thousands. He stands for a free Palestine. He expressed his love for his Jewish friends. He wants the people of Palestine to know they have not been forgotten by the world. I wonder the harm in his words, for I can find none.
No to genocide. No to killing children. No to ethnic cleansing. No to colonisation. No to vilification of an entire group of people for the acts of a few. Including the vilification of Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Black and Brown people. No to antisemitism. No to anti-Muslim. No to racism.
For me, that is an easy choice, and an easy stand.
The bigger story is the power of the Israeli lobby, those who hold the media, the venues, the advertising channels, the politicians, in the palm of their hands. It must be dismantled. Monopoly must be dismantled. That kind of pressure from power indicates unchecked power and systemic corruption.
It is this type of power, the power of the whim of the elite billionaire class to force their agenda, that must be ended.
Free Palestine.
“Who is winning the internet, who is getting cancelled, who gets to play the stadium and who doesn’t, all of it becomes so small when held against what we are actually witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank. An entire people being displaced, starved and killed while the world debates which words we are allowed to use to describe it, how those words make us feel, and whether our discomfort matters more than the people living through a genocide.
I didn’t need 10 shows from Ed. I needed 2. Two chances to stand up in front of 90,000 people and say the words that somehow became too dangerous to say.
Free Palestine.
But if those words cost me the stage, while turning the conversation back to Palestine, then it was the most successful tour I’ve ever been on.”
Mackelmore wrote these words at the end of his long post on Social Media. It is worth reading the entire post. This is a man who knows moral integrity.
PS. Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots and the person who refused to let Mackelmore appear in his stadiums, released a statement that included this line. “But only sharing selective information and ignoring the actions of Hamas is not honest and only advances more divisiveness and hate.”
Evil in all shades is rightly condemned. Hamas is the easy scapegoat. Overwhelmingly underfunded and underarmed against one of the most powerful militaries in the world, which is fully supported by the most powerful military in the world, Hamas is a literal creation of colonisation and ethnic cleansing; the evil actions of Hamas are rendered almost insignificant by the extent of the ongoing atrocity by Israel for the last 78 years.
If Hamas are so bad, let the world’s journalists into Gaza, and into the Israeli prisons. Show the world just how good and right and moral you are.
Published September 15th 2026. Photo taken September 15th 2026