It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when Robert Kraft forces NFL fans to choose between endorsing his rabid support for Middle East genocide and their support for a particular NFL team:
Ed Sheeran has lost 200,000 Instagram followers in 24 hours as he faces a growing campaign to cancel him amid a Palestine row over his US tour. All of the remaining opening acts on his tour have dropped out in response to rapper Macklemore being kicked off the live dates following a ‘free Palestine’ speech.
Macklemore was due to open for Sheeran at eight of the remaining ten shows on his tour in America, which continues on Friday in Philadelphia, but on Tuesday it was announced that he had been dropped. Ed has now lost his remaining support acts – Billie Eilish’s brother and music partner Finneas, his close friend Myles Smith, Aaron Rowe, Lukas Graham and Beoga, who have put out separate statements announcing that they will not continue with their dates on the Loop Tour.
Breaking his silence amid the backlash, Ed, 35, said that his audience is often young people ‘from different backgrounds’ who do not expect his shows to be a political forum. While his Instagram follower count stood at 47.6million on Monday, it has now dropped to 47.4million.
Macklemore faced a boycott petition to remove him from the tour after he delivered a politically motivated speech in support of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank during his performances at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on September 4 and 5.
Responding with an Instagram statement after it was confirmed that he will not be the opening act for the remainder of the Loop Tour, the rapper claimed that Ed told him billionaire Robert Kraft orchestrated the move after ‘rallying stadium owners and issuing an ultimatum’. Kraft is the CEO of the Kraft Group, which owns the NFL team the New England Patriots, as well as the Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts where Sheeran is due to play later in September.
My sense is that a number of influential Jews in the USA have wildly overplayed their antisemitism card. It’s not the 1970s anymore. Young people around the world are much better informed than the Boomers were back in the day, when their opinions were guided by Roots, the construction of Holocaustianity, and the “plucky little Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, and the USA’s Greatest Ally” narrative. And even for those who still hold sacred one or more elements of that propaganda, none of it grants Israel moral cover for either the Gazacaust, the invasions of Syria and Lebanon, or dragging the Trump administration into defeat and economic disaster.
That’s the thing about power. If you don’t use it well, and use it for the material benefit of others, eventually you’ll be held accountable for that. Robert Kraft has been a remarkably effective NFL owner, but now he is abusing his power as a well-connected venue owner and every opening act on Ed Sheeran’s tour has rejected that. Sheeran himself doesn’t need them, but I very much doubt that given his own heritage, he’s going to be terribly inclined to sacrifice his career for Robert “Five Dolla” Kraft and Kraft’s staunch support for imperialist genocide in the Middle East.
And the longer the economically suicidal War to Save Israel From Iran continues, the more likely it is that NFL fans are going to see that Robert Kraft has played his part in their own economic suffering and react in a similar fashion to the music fans.