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Opinionartists against genocide
Opinion Ed Sheeran says he’s apolitical. His Macklemore decision tells a different story
The controversy over the dropping of Macklemore from the UK star’s US tour has rumbled on all week, leaving Sheeran in a sticky spot.
LAST UPDATE | 16 Sep
‘WE KNOW WHO Ed Sheeran is now’, actor Liam Cunningham wrote on X, echoing the views of many Irish social media users, after Macklemore was dropped from Ed Sheeran’s US tour. Most of them were unsympathetic to Sheeran’s stance on the matter.
The Englishman won’t have to hand back his Irish passport, but his past defence of his ‘cultural Irishness’ is starting to ring a little hollow.
A controversy exploded this week when Macklemore was dropped as the support act for Sheeran’s American tour. The first of their gigs together took place at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, where the hip-hop artist delivered a passionate pro-Palestinian message during his performance.
His words were met with immediate backlash, which he addressed the next night.
Speaking directly to any of those from the Jewish community in attendance, he said, ‘criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you.’ It did little to placate his critics.
A group called StopAntiSemitism accused him of spreading anti-Israel propaganda in a post which was shared by the singer Pink.
She in turn said that she found the performance scared her ‘as a Jewish mom’.
Separately, the Israeli American Council asked for Macklemore to be removed from the remaining tour dates.
By Monday morning, they got their wish when the rapper confirmed that he would no longer be appearing on the shows.
Macklemore alleged that Sheeran’s team made the decision after receiving an ultimatum from a group of stadium owners: if the rapper remained on the bill, the shows would be cancelled.
He recognised that Sheeran was put in a difficult position and that ‘his typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it had never been before.’
Sheeran issued a statement on Instagram Tuesday addressing the situation. He sympathised with the suffering and claimed that the decision to drop Macklemore was made by the tour promoter.
‘There is a reason I do not use my professional platform for politics’, he wrote. ‘Those who come to my shows do not expect a political forum.’
Here’s the thing: the singer has previously fundraised for Ukraine and used his social media platform to deliver messages like ‘I just want to say to all Ukrainians that I love you, I stand with you’.
Being ‘apolitical’ is not the same as caring less about Palestinian children being bombed than you do Ukrainian children being bombed. Nor does it mean refusing to acknowledge suffering when it is politically inconvenient. Sheeran has used his platform in the past, so why is this political expression acceptable in relation to one war, but not another? Even if he flat disagreed with Macklemore’s words, he should have defended his right to use them.
The discomfort of Gaza
Let’s get something straight before we delve deeper into this disappointing tale about musical artists with opposing views…
Over 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza since October 7, with over 40,000 injured. That’s children. Not one of those kids was responsible for the heinous crimes of October 7, not one deserved to suffer and die at the hands of Israel’s Zionist government. Not one mattered any less than any other child on this planet.
What Netanyahu’s government has done in Gaza to the Palestinians since October 7 is a genocide. That’s not just me saying that; this assertion is backed up by the UN, with growing international consensus on the horrors visited on the Palestinian people by Israel’s leaders in the past three years. Gaza has been razed to the ground, and the people left in the rubble face a mounting humanitarian crisis.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has an arrest warrant out for Netanyahu himself since 2024 for ‘war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population’. And that’s just in Gaza, we haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s happening with Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
This is not a ‘both sides’ scenario, Ed, nor is it a ‘conflict between Israel and Palestine’. It can no longer be characterised as such. This is the deliberate, cruel and exceedingly dark attempt to wipe out an entire people. And it’s happening now, in real time. For years. And it’s not about Jew versus non-Jew. It’s about a weak and unstable global leadership that is not only unwilling to confront Netanyahu’s government but actively enables its destructive ideology. It’s about complicit silence, and artists with an ounce of understanding of that cannot stand idly by. Playing your guitar on the sidelines is no longer an option. It’s clearly time to pick a side.
Where do you stand?
And this is where the Ed Sheeran tour controversy has landed us. It has displayed in technicolour where true allegiances lie and where the power base is. There is context here. Sheeran’s US tour comes with Donald Trump in the White House and winds its way through an America that is now heavily laden with Zionist political influence, in the form of AIPAC and a slew of billionaire backers. The atmosphere is febrile, the algorithm stirs it all up, and things are tense.
Sheeran’s other openers and his backing band have all now quit the tour in solidarity with Macklemore. This includes Irish singer-songwriter Aaron Rowe, Irish band Beoga, and Irish-American Finneas. The Irish connection here is striking.
On a human level, you’d have to have sympathy for all artists involved. Many of them are new groups, and the idea that you can support a global act like Sheeran on such a grand scale is the dream. You just want to play music, to entertain. But the world has changed, and it has brought with it a reality that can no longer be escaped. The acts who pulled out in the last 48 hours understand this. Sheeran, maybe not so much.
His standing up to the stadium owners this week would certainly have cost Sheeran an amount of money that most of us can only dream of. Ordinary people are often forced to take jobs with companies whose values don’t necessarily align with their own because they need the money to live. Turning down work because of an ethical position is something that only very privileged people can afford to do.
Although he’s been marketed very effectively as an everyman, Sheeran is very far from being an ordinary person. He’s a multimillionaire who could spend the rest of his life enjoying a luxurious lifestyle funded just from the royalties he receives from his music alone.
We don’t know for sure why he was unwilling to take a stand for the Palestinian people, never mind his old pal Macklemore. He may genuinely believe that his fans are best served by him acting as the ‘man in the middle’ here, the peacemaker. Perhaps it is just about the money. Maybe he’s afraid. He has said the decision was made by the promoter. What we do know is that he ultimately accepted that outcome and has defended his preference for keeping his concerts apolitical.
But Sheeran’s decision this week is damaging to his brand, at least on this side of the Atlantic. And it flies in the face of the artist he has purported to be in the past… standing up for the oppressed, highlighting important issues like homelessness and equality.
The Irish connection
And maybe that’s the biggest surprise here. Why Sheeran’s stance is so different to that of his support bands. Many Irish bands have been vocal about the plight of the Palestinians. This solidarity between the Irish and Palestinians is often attributed to our histories. We both understand the torment and trauma of generations shaped by colonialism. We know what it means to live under the weight of an oppressive power, to lose land, to see families and communities displaced in favour of newcomers and to watch violence and forced starvation become part of everyday life.
Sheeran’s father is from Belfast, and Ed has always defined himself ‘culturally Irish’, so you’d imagine he would understand this better than most. But being ‘culturally Irish’ is about more than singing songs or liking trad music. It is also about understanding the significance of music and art as protest in the Irish psyche. Which begs the question: how can the main artist on a tour not at least understand the political leanings of all the support bands? Maybe it just never came up.
Macklemore, meanwhile, is an American artist with Irish roots. That he stood alone on that stage and said ‘Free Palestine’ is something that the Diaspora can at least be proud of. The Irish artists who followed and left the tour also deserve our respect. Maybe Sheeran’s Irishness, for what it was worth, was just meaningless marketing slop all along.
So no, I don’t actually believe he should have to hand over his Irish passport. But at the very least, the Copper Face Jacks Gold Card (a VIP pass to Dublin’s most infamous nightclub) that was awarded to him in 2017 should definitely be revoked.
‘My dad is Irish. My family is Irish. I have an Irish passport,’ Sheeran once wrote on Instagram. ‘Just coz I was born somewhere else doesn’t change my culture, I can be allowed to feel connection to a place half of my family is from.’
Fair enough, Ed. I’m not interested in policing other people’s identity. But deep down, he might have assimilated to British and American culture better than he thinks.
Peter Flanagan is an Irish comedian and writer based in London.
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