Benefit concerts typically raised money for people like 9/11 families and children with cancer. This week, Macklemore takes one on the road for a group that admired the people who carried out the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
His “Free Palestine” tour plays Dublin on October 26, Paris on October 29, and London on October 30. The proceeds go to 12 organizations, among them the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), a network of Palestinian and Arab activists in the United States, Canada and Britain.
On the first anniversary of October 7, PYM published an essay calling the Hamas invasion a “prison break.” It hailed the invaders as “the men who broke through.”
One week after the massacre, while bodies in Be’eri and Kfar Aza were still being identified and bloodied young women were being held in Gaza, PYM declared this “resistance” fundamentally just.
Those men murdered about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza. They burned families alive in their safe rooms. They hunted and raped young people through the fields of the Nova music festival. They filmed it, and one called his parents to brag about how many Jews he had killed. PYM’s account mentions none of it.
Macklemore's accusations against Israel
Over two nights in early September, opening for Ed Sheeran at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, Macklemore libelously accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid.”
Behind him, the stadium screens ran footage from Gaza, images of Israeli soldiers, and a message asking the audience to “stop the genocide in Gaza.” He said nothing about October 7, the hostages, or Hamas. Then, in a final act of gaslighting, he assured the Jews in the crowd that none of it was aimed at them.
Robert Kraft, who owns Gillette Stadium, refused to host Macklemore at Sheeran’s two Massachusetts shows, citing those remarks and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery. Other NFL stadium owners followed, and Macklemore was dropped from the rest of the American tour.
Kraft offered no examples. He could have pointed to 2014, when Macklemore performed “Thrift Shop” in a hooked prosthetic nose, black wig and beard, an unmistakable caricature of a Jew.
Macklemore tells it differently: a Jewish billionaire rallied his fellow owners and issued an ultimatum, and anyone who calls a critic of Israel antisemitic is trying to silence him.
So much for “silencing.” Ten days after Macklemore was dropped, he announced the new tour, which he says sold out immediately. Free speech lets Macklemore say whatever he likes, however antisemitic. It has never obliged a Jew to hand him the microphone.
And it has been very good for business. In 2013, “Thrift Shop” and “Can’t Hold Us” both reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and in 2014 he won four Grammys. In March 2023, seven months before October 7, his album Ben debuted at No. 18 and vanished.
On September 13, the day before he was dropped, “Hind’s Hall,” his 2024 single, drew just over 5,000 US streams. On September 15, it drew about 87,000, its best day in more than two years, according to Luminate data reported by Billboard. His overall streams doubled in 48 hours, to nearly two million a day.
He ran the same play in May 2024. When he posted his anti-Israel “Hind’s Hall” on Instagram, the video drew about 173 million views, and he picked up more than half a million followers in three days.
Attacking the only Jewish state pays. Sudan does not, though its civil war has uprooted more than 12 million people. At MetLife, Macklemore tossed Sudan into a list of causes alongside Cuba. Sudan got a word.
Israel got the screens, a song, and now a tour. Yemen’s war, which began when the Iranian-backed Houthis seized Sanaa in 2014, had killed an estimated 377,000 people by the end of 2021. Nobody sells out arenas for Sudan or Yemen. The market rewards outrage at one country, and Macklemore has learned to read it.
THE BILL for this lands on people who will never buy a ticket. On October 20, Shomrim, the Jewish volunteer patrol in north London, posted footage of brutal assaults on two Jewish women in Stamford Hill. Macklemore plays London 10 days later.
When rioting swept France this month, the Combat Antisemitism Movement tracked a wave of posts blaming Jews for the chaos, some calling for their expulsion or extermination. Twelve days after the riots began, Macklemore brings the antisemitic genocide-libel to a sold-out Paris arena.
None of this requires Macklemore to hate Jews, and he claims he does not. It requires only that he never ask what this money buys. Tickets are sold through Ticketmaster, which Live Nation owns.
The Israeli-American Council has demanded that Live Nation explain its vetting. Neither has explained how PYM made the list. Romanticizing a massacre as a jailbreak is how the next one gets excused before it happens.
PYM chose the prison metaphor for a reason. An escaping prisoner can be sympathetic. The facts are not. Israel pulled every soldier and every Jew out of Gaza in 2005. Two years later Hamas seized the territory in a coup, throwing rival Fatah men off rooftops.
The “prison” has a border with Egypt. Its rulers poured untold tons of aid materials into tunnels dug to attack Jewish homes. Righteous escaping prisoners do not stop to massacre, rape, and mutilate.
The deeper lie is that Palestinians were locked out of statehood. They were offered it and said no. Their leaders rejected the Peel Commission’s partition plan in 1937 and the UN’s in 1947 and answered the second offer with war.
Yasser Arafat walked away from Camp David in 2000 without a counteroffer. Mahmoud Abbas never answered Ehud Olmert’s 2008 offer of a state on territory equivalent to nearly all the “West Bank” and Gaza. A leadership that has refused a state for nine decades is not a prisoner. It keeps throwing away the key.
Macklemore said he has been “silenced.” He is about to be heard in Dublin, Paris, and London. The murdered 1,200 have no such stage, and part of his receipts will go to people who call their murderers heroes. The fans filling those arenas are not standing up to power. They are paying for the myth that excused the massacre, and that myth always sends its bill to the Jews. In blood.
Micha Danzig is a contributing opinion writer for The Jerusalem Post and other Jewish publications, as well as an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former New York Police Department officer.
Follow us on GoogleSource: The Jerusalem Post · MICHA DANZIG
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