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American rapper Macklemore was dropped from musician Ed Sheeran’s tour after anti-Israel rhetoric at previous concerts.
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In a post on Instagram on Monday, he said: “Ed Sheeran and his team have made the decision to remove me from the Loop tour.”
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Macklemore, 43, opened for the English singer-songwriter earlier this month at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey when he chanted “Free Palestine” and accused Israel of apartheid and genocide, the Jewish Journal of Greater Boston reported.
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“There was a pre-planned video with IDF soldiers as Nazis,” concertgoer Lauren Chizner told CBS News.
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In a video posted on X by Macklemore showing him speaking to the MetLife crowd, he said: “One of the reasons why I wanted to come on this tour was because I wanted to stand up here on stages and stadiums across America and say two words that are near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine.”
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He told Jewish crowd members that criticizing Israel was not a criticism of the Jewish people.
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The Israeli American Council called on Sheeran to remove Macklemore from his tour. “Do not allow your stage to be used to divide people or spread one-sided political propaganda,” the group wrote on Instagram.
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The group started a petition to have Macklemore removed from the tour.
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“The question is where the line should be drawn when an opening act uses a global concert platform to advance a one-sided political agenda,” it said online.
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“This becomes even more troubling when the message relies on selective imagery, biased messaging, and disputed claims presented to a massive audience as fact, without context or complexity.”
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American singer Pink, who is Jewish, later commented on what happened at MetLife.
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“I have never asked for another artist to be silenced and I’m not asking now. I don’t need anyone fired, and I don’t need a refund,” she wrote.
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“What I need is to be able to say, as a Jewish mom, ‘That scared me, and it scared people I love,’ without being told our fear is just propaganda, and without being told I’m somehow cool with genocide because I noticed.”
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She recalled when Macklemore dressed up as what appeared to be a caricature of a Jewish person in 2014, by putting on “a hooked nose, a black beard and a bowl cut, performed in it, and called it a ‘random costume.’”
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It was slammed by critics at the time, who called it antisemitic. Macklemore later apologized.
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Pink said she “let it go…Then last weekend he stood in front of a stadium full of music-loving families, with violent images from a war on the screens, dedicated a song to the movement of his choice, and then took the mic to tell all of the Jews in the stadium that it wasn’t about them.”