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Notes -
Macklemore x Ed Sheeran concert: politics cannot be ignored
Ed Sheeran (everyone's favorite dreamy male singer) is holding a big tour across North and South America. Macklemore (everyone's favorite white rapper) got kicked out after (in an earlier concert) saying "Free Palestine", playing a song with pro-Palestine lyrics, and this:
Ed Sheeran has defended himself, saying it was not his decision - indeed, one Robert Kraft graciously confirmed he coordinated venues to boycott Macklemore - though Sheeran also remarked he tries to avoid politics in general:
So far, four other performers have dropped in solidarity with Macklemore.
Interestingly, Gillette stadium which banned Macklemore is hosting Kanye West, yes, the guy who was praising Hitler a year ago (albeit later admitting mental illness).
What do you think?
First, let me address the elephant in the room: the music industry is a corrupt dumpsterfire, basically a cartel. This is what cartels do. Besides dropping his pro-Palestine friend, Sheeran must also accept Ticketmaster price-gouging attendees, limited tour dates (I overheard somewhere there used to be far more concerts), and other nonsense. He probably could just find more accomodating venues if every one wasn't owned by Live Nation.
Lots of people are discussing how politics can't be avoided, and they're right. This is an excellent case study of how the endgame of "politics" convolutes everything and makes everyone miserable. Everyone loses here: Macklemore for taking a mild pro-Palestine stance gets kicked out of venues and attacked by Palestine opposers, Sheeran for taking a pro-peace neutral stance gets his tour lineup wrecked and attacked by Palestine supporters. There is nothing these performers can do, even be completely silent, that won't get them attacked by some group.
But the other side of "every side gets you attacked" is that no side is truly best. With no obvious winning strategy, you can be truer to yourself. And as Macklemore says:
Less tyrannical cartels, more people able to say what they want and go home to their families (with careers, money, opportunity, safety, and audiences)...I can defend these by linking them to other axioms, but ultimately they just seem right to me. I think celebrities should express their politics (including neutrality), for authenticity, and moreso because they can: it widens the Overton Window as they avoid life-ruining consequences. Even Kanye and his edgy schizo-manifestations, which I (unsuprisingly) strongly disagree with, but don't hate and even sort of appreciate for some odd reason. Yes my thinking is flawed, but look, his "cancellation" gave him the Streisand effect and today he performs where even Macklemore cannot, so what is flawless?
(Also, holy shit, can news sites link to their actual sources instead of writing articles whose sole content is paraphrasing them? Credit to variety.com of all outlets, the one article I found that did, albeit in the middle.)
Jeff Maurer expresses more or less my thoughts on this whole thing more eloquently than I could ever hope to:
He notes that Macklemore
claiming not to be antisemiticpresenting himself as peaceful and moderate is nonsense when he specifically name-checked CUAD and Students for Justice in Palestine, two organisations who openly support Hamas (among other things, the former group defended a member who stated "Zionists don't deserve to live", while the latter has praised the Hamas "martyrs").This would seem to be evidence for anti-zionism, anti-zionism ≠ antisemitism.
Even if I accept your claim that "Zionist" was not being used as a codeword for "Jew", this rather clearly demonstrates that Macklemore is lying when he presents himself as a hippy-dippy peace-and-love dude who is simply innocently horrified by "genocide" and "apartheid". He explicitly supports (by name) groups that support violent resistance against Israel i.e. he is a crypto-Hamas supporter.
This "code word" stuff, er, codes as progressives. Very "dog whistle."
As @The_Nybbler notes below me, the essence of a "dog whistle" is that it's a turn of phrase that sounds innocuous to most people, but which has a special secret meaning to those in the know. Like the verbal equivalent of a secret handshake.
"Zionist" is the opposite. While its literal meaning is simply "one who supports the existence of a Jewish nation-state in the middle east, regardless of their religious beliefs or ethnic background" – in practice, nine times out of ten when people use it, they simply mean "one of those people with a surname like Coen or Katz". (I dare say that many of the people using it as a term of abuse would literally not know the former meaning.) Everyone understands this, especially all of the people with surnames like Coen or Katz: "Zionist" simply offers merely the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability. When people hang up posters around Athens saying "Zionists out", every Jew (regardless of their opinion of Israel and its right to exist or lack thereof) understands that they're not welcome. When Palestine Action splatters red paint on Jewish-owned businesses around London under the pretext of intimidating "Zionists" – I mean, come on, you don't really think they asked the owners what they thought about the war in Gaza, and only targeted those with the "wrong" opinions, do you? When two Irish women approached an Israeli man in a restaurant, spat on him and yelled at him that "Zionists" aren't welcome in Ireland – likewise.
Yes, a Zionist is just someone who supports the existence of a Jewish nation-state in the middle east, regardless of their religious beliefs or ethnic background. Just like "urban youth" refers to affluent white college students who live in New York City.
I've heard plain old white evangelicals and people with names like Mike Huckabee referred to as Zionists too. They refer to themselves as such. This cohort was huge in the 2000s but since seems to have become contested territory, with some breaking toward Tucker and Fuentes. That leaves increasingly only Jews left. And this too gets dicey because left-wing Jews have only become more strongly anti-Zionist. When a left-wing Jew calls a right-wing Jew Zionist, is that also anti-semitic? (If so, are they a self-hating Jew, like an Uncle Tom?)
No, it's the 1 out of 10 for the 9 out of 10.
Makes me wonder if some black Americans took up a nation-building exercise in West Africa, if it would be racist criticize that. Unless you're black.
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Ah. They seem to punch above their weight in the discourse, so it seems higher. Especially if you're in a college town. It's ambient.
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Dog whistles are meant to be un-noticed by those not their targets. The term "anti-Zionist" is merely the thinnest veil of plausible deniability in most cases.
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Why does opposition to genocide require a "hippy-dippy peace-and-love" attitude?
The Nazis weren't stopped by hippies waving signs but by the Red Army tearing through East Prussia committing enough war crimes to make Hamas look like humanitarian organization.
If you think that Israel is committing a genocide then it logically follows that violent resistance is justified, assuming you aren't a full on pacifist.
It doesn't. But I think that's how Macklemore is trying to present himself: as an ordinary well-meaning guy who believes in equality and civil rights, who's appalled by the footage he sees coming out of Gaza and thinks something should be done to stop it. As controversial as his speech was, he never explicitly dedicated his set to "the brave Mujahedeen fighters of Hamas", or called upon the audience to stone the Jew wherever he lies: he's smart enough to know that doing so would make him look like a nutcase. Instead, he does the savvier (and more dishonest) thing of presenting himself like an ordinary well-meaning dude, while explicitly endorsing groups who've been much more open in their extremism then he has, and banking on most people listening not knowing the specifics of what those groups believe. This seems like the constant two-step with the "moderate" pro-Palestinians in the West (and the "moderate" left more broadly). They generally claim that they want to bring about a two-state solution via peaceful means like BDI or other kinds of economic sanctions – and yet you notice that they never offer any criticism of Hamas or the other violent pro-Palestinian groups whose ideology and methods they claim to decry, they amplify their propaganda at every turn, and seem exuberant when they achieve tactical wins (however brief and temporary).
Indeed, I'd respect Mackle- a great deal More if he actually came out and said "there's a genocide going on right now that's just as bad as the Holocaust, so we have to stop it the same way we stopped the Holocaust – by waging total war on the people committing it". The fact that he felt the need to equivocate, hedge and delegate his opinions suggests to me that either a) he doesn't consider stopping the "genocide" worth torpedoing his career over, or b) he doesn't believe it's a genocide either. The only thing more contemptible than a Jew-hater is a Jew-hater who can't even commit to the bit.
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I think any other direction has darker implications: to reverse your claim (which, to be fair, is factually accurate to my knowledge), those that would commit mass ethnic cleansing of Jews in the 1940s were stopped by making their cities look like Dresden. Why wouldn't "Never Again" mean turning cities (Rafah) to such in 2026 for the same reason? "Which river? Which sea?". I don't agree with it, but I can at least understand the position.
Ultimately, the cycle of violence is only broken when one side loses or admits defeat — the West Germans were to some extent lucky the Western Allies were more magnanimous than many other historical examples — or when "hippy-dippy peace-and-love attitudes" prevail. In most cases I can imagine, I'd prefer the latter.
Richard Hanania made a similar argument years ago: the conflict will only end permanently when most Palestinians understand that militarily defeating Israel is impossible.
Militarily defeating Israel isn't impossible, though. You can argue the ought, but Israel is bleeding public support pretty much everywhere, and it is entirely possible it ends up as a pariah state. It has an exceptional military, relative to its immediate neighbors, but that military was exceptional under the old paradigm, the old paradigm is going away, and its performance under the new paradigm has not been stellar. It is entirely possible that we will live to see the end of the nation of israel.
I think the chances of Hamas (in concert with Hezbollah, the Houthis etc.) defeating Israel in a direct military confrontation in either of our lifetimes is somewhere around nil. I acknowledge it could be a different story if a bigger power got involved (e.g. if Iran began waging war directly, rather than through proxies). But many Palestinian citizens seem to have this idea that Hamas will eventually invade Israel and conquer the entire nation, undoing the humiliation wrought by the Nakba and decades of uncontested Israeli military dominance in one fell swoop. That is a fantasy. It's interesting that no one seems to know this better than Hamas's leaders themselves.
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With the crucial difference that Rafah was demolished, whereas the antizionists are still a decade or so away from possessing the power to demolish Tel Aviv. I'm not inventing a new standard, just taking the existing one and applying it consistently.
The "hippy-dippy peace-and-love attitudes" only came out after Germany was defeated. If the Wehrmacht had been greeted by a bunch of protesters waving peace signs instead of millions of heavily armed Red Army soldiers then the war would have gone very differently.
I'll grant that there is a range of actions that are more extreme than total pacifism and less extreme than Dresden but basically anyone who isn't a total pacifist is going to say that armed resistance to an ongoing genocide is justified.
Sure, but they demonstrably did a quite a bit to Be'eri.
And Dresden was largely carried out by American forces: no American cities were even modestly impacted by enemy violence during WWII. The total number of civilian casualties in the 48 states during the war is countable on a single hand. Even London with the Blitz wasn't hit anywhere near as hard as Dresden or other German cities. Does "the Germans were a decade away from possessing the power to demolish Washington" (roughly true) mean that FDR was the baddie there? I personally don't think so, but YMMV.
ETA: On looking, there were six civilians killed in the 48 states during the war, who died from a Japanese balloon fire bomb. Not quite one hand.
So did the IDF tank that responded to the ongoing hostage situation by opening fire on the hostages
The antizionists who will be destroying Israel aren't Palestinians but Americans and Europeans. I wasn't saying that Palestinians were going to somehow amass the power to obliterate Tel Aviv in a decade but that the political changes in developed Western countries caused by Israel's campaign in Gaza and the subsequent mess the Middle East has devolved into will ultimately lead to Israel's destruction.
At any rate, the original example I gave was of the Red Army in East Prussia where none of these differences apply. The point is that even a bloodthirsty, vengeful horde led by a brutal tyrant committing the worst atrocities imaginable can still be viewed as the lesser evil when they're up against a genocidaire. "Armed resistance" is far, far short of what Stalin's troops did to the German civilians who fell into their clutches.
Was Stalin "the baddie" in WW2? I personally don't think "the baddie" is a meaningful term; in the vast majority of wars you don't have a choice between the "good guy" and the "bad guy", you have a choice between the "bad guy" and the "worse guy". Stalin and FDR were bad guys (obviously FDR less than Stalin) and Hitler was the worse guy. If Israel is guilty of genocide then it follows that armed resistance is justified; that doesn't make Hamas the "good guy", it makes them the "bad" to Israel's "worse".
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