No stand is a stand
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. 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 not Ed Sheeran. It is the machinery that made his choice feel necessary. A lobby with the money to unseat sitting members of Congress, and the relationships to close a venue with a phone call, decided that a man saying free Palestine could not walk onto an American stage.
Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots and the person who refused to let Macklemore 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.”
He is simply the part of that machinery we can see. Unchecked power of this kind – the capacity of a handful of billionaires to set the boundary of what ninety thousand people are permitted to hear – is systemic corruption, whatever cause it is exercised in. It must be dismantled.
Evil in all shades is rightly condemned, and I condemn it in every shade. Hamas has committed atrocities. Hamas is also the easy scapegoat, and the answer to a question no one in power wants asked: what did seventy-eight years of dispossession produce?
Armed movements do not appear from nowhere. Israel’s own security establishment has long been reported to have tolerated and enabled Islamist organising in Gaza as a counterweight to the secular PLO. None of that excuses what Hamas has done. It explains why condemning Hamas, and only Hamas, is not a moral position. It is an alibi.
And proportion is not a technicality. One side holds one of the most powerful militaries on earth, underwritten by the most powerful. The other holds tunnels and rockets. Where the power sits, the responsibility sits.
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.
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.”
Macklemore 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.
Published September 15th 2026. Photo taken September 15th 2026
