RANT: A PRINCIPLED STAND

 

    MACKLEMORE

THE OTHER DAY there was a bit of a spat in the music world when English singer, Ed Sheeran, during his American “Loop” tour dismissed his opening act, Macklemore, because the rapper uttered the verboten words: “Free Palestine” during his September 5-6 performances after which he sang his “Hind’s Hall” song, which honoured Columbia University students for their on campus protests against the genocide in Gaza.*

 

MACKLEMORE put his foot in it for daring to utter those (so-called) “anti-Semitic” words during his MetLife New, Jersey, stadium performances. The backlash was instantaneous, with billionaire Zionist Robert Kraft, owner of the Gillette stadium in Foxborough Massachusetts where Sheeran and Macklemore were scheduled next to perform, refused to host the musical event if Macklemore remained on the ticket. The Israeli-American Council (IAC) was in high dungeon over Macklemore’s public support for the Palestinian cause. They started a petition which garnered tens of thousands of signatures for the rapper’s removal from the show. 

 

THE GIG IN MASSACHUSETTS was canceled altogether, ostensively because of a severe weather warning. Other rich, Zionist billionaires and stadium owners followed suit, threatening to pull the plug on the show if Macklemore was not dropped from the tour. And so, the American rapper was let go by Sheeran, who is a friend and long-time musical collaborator with the rap star.

 

     Mackelmore at MetLife Statiium, New Jersey Sept. 5

With Macklemore’s removal from the tour, it's Oopsie time! Ed's the one who’s stuck in doo-doo now, facing a backlash from his fan base.

Subsequently Sheeran and his billionaire buddy, Rob Kraft, offered to donate 2-million-dollars each to Palestinian causes. Wha-wha… Talk about ham-fisted damage control! As for Macklemore, he's currently putting together a “Free Palestine Tour” with gigs in Dublin, Paris and London, and all the proceeds will go to Palestinian relief agencies. Quite the contrast, don't you think between neutral Ed and principled Macklemore?

BEFORE THIS, I had only heard of Ed Sheeran. I knew he was a musician, but that’s all. I had never heard of the rapper, Macklemore.¹ But, between the two, I think I know who is standing on the right side of history.

 

AFTER HIS DISMISSAL, Macklemore posted a long Telegram post which I include here:

 

“I’m not sure how to start this. So, I’m going to speak from the heart and share the truth. Ed Sheeran and his team have made the decision to remove me from “The Loop” tour. But before I get into it, I want to say something that should be obvious. In this moment I think it matters. I am not a victim. Ed Sheeran is not a victim. Pink [A 80s singer well past her sell-by date who expressed public criticism of Macklemore’s pro-Palestinian stance. Ed] is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families.

The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women and children who have been killed, starved, displaced and forced to live through unimaginable violence. More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza alone. People are being killed today, and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don’t lose sight of that.

Ed is my friend. I’ve known him for 13 years. We’ve shared late nights, studio sessions and stages. He has this infectious magic about him that I’ve grown to love. I consider him a brother. And because of that, we’ve had some difficult conversations this past week. The type of talks rooted in love and respect for one another that still end in a place of fundamental disagreement. Nothing I’m writing here is out of spite or because I want to tear down his character. But, as I told Ed multiple times on the phone, our friendship can’t change my responsibility to tell the truth about what happened.

Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding Pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him. We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.

Ed was in a fucked-up position. He knew it. His typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had before. He told me that the words “Free Palestine” and the image of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to a lot of people he spoke with. I told him that if those words were more offensive that tens of thousands of Palestinian children being killed by Israel, then there was a fundamental disconnect between where those people stood and where I stood. But he couldn’t get past his public facing, “I don’t take sides”.

And I get why people don’t. taking a side can cost you. Money, brand deals, sponsorships, festivals, private shows, relationships and access. I’ve lost all of those things. But there is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed. When one side has the bombs and bottomless financial and military support from America, refusing to take a side doesn’t leave you in the middle.

What I said at MetLife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years. So why is it an issue now? Because now I’m sharing a stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stadiums in America. At a certain level of exposure, “Free Palestine” becomes too much of a risk. If I kept doing the shows, saying Free Palestine, with Ed implicitly supporting it, the crowd getting loud and showing undeniable support for Palestinian liberation, what artist might speak out next? The stage becomes resistance. Maybe that’s why this time it became so important to silence me.

And one of the most effective ways to enforce that silence has been to weaponize the accusation of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real. And that is exactly why the word matters too much to be used as a shield against criticism of the Israeli state. When criticizing Israel, opposing Zionism or saying “Free Palestine” gets conflated with hatred of Jewish people, it doesn’t protect Jewish people. It protects Israel from accountability.

I hope this isn’t the end of my relationship with Ed. Thirteen years of friendship doesn’t disappear because of one painful disagreement. I hope we both continue listening, studying what is happening in Palestine and wrestling with what neutrality means in a moment like this. My door will always be open to continuing that conversation.

When my brother Omar was doing the subtitles for the video I posted from MetLife, I thanked him. He told me there’s a phrase in Arabic: “La shukra ala wajeb” (“There is no thanks for a duty”).

That stayed with me. Because that’s what this has become for me and millions of others around the world. A  duty. Not something deserving of praise or gratitude. Not brave. Human.

Who is winning the internet, who is getting canceled, 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 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.”

 

 

CHEERS, JAKE. ______________________________________________________________

 

*

    HIND RAJAB

IN APRIL 2024, ON THE CAMPUS of Columbia University (New York), students protesting the genocide in Gaza took over Hamilton Hall, renaming it “Hind’s Hall” in honour of the five-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajad, who was murdered in cold blood by Israeli troops earlier, on January 29. Reader’s may recall the horrific event where Hind, trapped in her uncle’s car, herself wounded and surrounded by her dead relatives, pleaded for over six hours for help from Red Crescent Society (RCS) on a cell phone last used by her fifteen-year-old cousin, Layan, who had called the RCS for help before dying of his wounds. She remained on the line until Israeli troops killed her some hours later in a hail of bullets. The IDF troops, which included a tank that fired its heavy machine gun into the car, also fired on the RCS ambulance as it approached the vehicle to rescue Hind, killing the two paramedics despite the fact that the Red Crescent Society had gotten an ‘all clear’ signal from Israeli authorities for their ambulance to enter the fire zone. But they were attacked anyway. In army lingo that’s called a “double tap” strike—killing the primary target and then first responders to the scene. Two weeks later, when Israeli forces had moved on from the area, rescue workers and Hind’s family recovered the bodies of Hind and six of her relatives along with the two first responders who gave their lives coming to Hind’s aid as she pleaded for help over her dead cousin’s phone.

Amusingly, if anything can be remotely amusing about this disgusting incident, the IDF have recently announced it is ‘investigating’ the death of Hind as well as the World Food Kitchen murders done by Israeli drone operators on April 1, 2024. [Some April Fools joke! Ed.] Recall reports that a WFK convoy of three vans, clearly marked with the WFK logo on their roofs, when returning to their warehouse came under Israeli drone attack, along a route it had earlier been granted clearance from the IDF to use. Seven aid workers were killed, including one dual American-Canadian citizen. We’ll see where these investigations will go. Nowhere, I imagine. And they’ll come with buckets and buckets of whitewash.

1. One rapper I do listen to is Britain’s Low Key who is an articulate and thoughtful voice both in his policial analysis and his music. He appears on various podcasts including Double Down News.  

 

 

   

CRINGE PIC: "OH CRAP!"

   

THE PIC IS OF EU's TOP DIPLOMAT, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security, the "stunning and brave"* Kaja Kallas, who is also VP of the European Commission. (Both are non-elected positions.) She is the EU’s chief diplomat who develops and maintains the Union’s foreign policy. She is a former Estonian president and is a dyed-in-the-wool Russia-hawk. Under her leadership, the EU has initiated a clusterfuck of twenty-one sanctions packages against Russia, as well as travel bans for over 3,000 Russian citizens to the European Union. The sanctions have arguably hurt the EU far more than Russia which began to align itself more with the East and with China. So, the economic body blows the EU hoped to inflict have been checked by Russia’s eastward diversification of its trade and investment practices. Of course, the European Union’s jaw-dropping obtuseness in shutting itself off (mostly) from cheap Russian natgas has wrecked economies like Germany that depend on economical petroleum distillates to run its industries. Thus, the EU's ban on importing Russian oil and natgas has crippled the most productive industrial economy in Europe. Way to go, guys! You’ve shot yourselves in both feet and you keep trying to shoot yourselves in the head, as well!  With leadership like this, who needs enemies!

 

ALONG WITH THE LEADERSHIP of the yapping poodles Baltic States—Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania—Kaja Kallas has been an especially uncompromising dolt of a FM, forever chanting, along with Ukraine of course, the same maximal demands: Russia must leave Ukrainian territory entirely, pay reparations, present Putin and other Russian leaders for trial at The Hague, etc. Somebody needs to tell Ms. Kallas that those demands are fine for the winning side, but Ukraine and its NATO backers are not winning. In fact, the war is lost and Ukraine is on life support; it is a 'zombie nation' still fighting only because European leaders continue throwing billions of taxpayer Euros into the money pit that is Ukraine. Pull the plug on the money and weapons sales (including weapons like long-range missiles that are starting to really piss-off the Russians) and the war stops.   

They've already lost; they just don’t know it yet.

 

    NOVO-ROSSIA THE TRADITIONAL LANDS OF RUSSIA

THE REALITY: Russia is systematically destroying the Ukrainian army, advancing on all fronts, has cut Ukraine off from its Black Sea ports (chief among them, Odessa, which is slated to fall this year), and because of the intransigence of EU leaders and especially Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, Russia will probably take the entirety of Novo Rossia, linking up with the Moldavian enclave of Transnistria, a predominately Russian-speaking province bordering Ukraine.

 

👉In 2022, shortly after Russia launched its “Special Military Operation”, the Kremlin asked for negotiations to resolve its concerns over a ‘NATOized’ Ukraine, something Russia said was a bridge too far and an absolute red-line.¹ Talks were held in Ankara, Türkiye and a peace treaty was hammered out, ready to be ratified. Then former British PM Boris Johnson made his infamous trek to Kiev and arm-twisted Zelensky into NOT accepting the deal.

Currently, just so everyone is clear on this, Russia has 1.5-million active-duty service personnel in its army and that’s without a mobilization of its population. Ukraine is bleeding a generation of its men on the battlefields of this ill-fated land. Their army is shrinking with unsustainable losses of men and materiel. 

With respect to war materiel production, Russia’s manufacturing base far exceeds Ukraine’s and NATO’s (including the United States). And, so, here we are today, with no peace treaty and Ukraine destined to become a land-locked, rump state where lawlessness and corruption will run rampant through what’s left of Ukrainian society².

👉Kaja Kallas’s hostility toward Russia makes her unsuitable for the role as the European Union’s chief diplomat. She refuses to even talk with Russia. But, isn’t talking a prerequisite for any sort of diplomacy to happen? Not to put too fine a point on it, but the fate of Ukraine will be decided on the battlefield with Russia making sure that further attacks on its homeland will stop, once and for all. And the EU will simply have to deal with the repercussions of this, all but guaranteed, outcome. 

IN THIS POST, I won't discuss the frightening possibility that this conflict may escalate into a wider war, and the dangers such an event holds for all of us in our not-to-distant future. More on that in another (and another?) post. 

 

👉IN THE ABOVE PIC, KALLAS is caught in a moment of confusion and perhaps a dawning realization that everything she has said, done and put into place as president of Estonia and as an EU policy chief has been wrong-headed, foolish, counter-productive bullshit that actually harms the people and institutions she purports to serve. And EU leadership in general, especially Kallas’s native Estonia, along with Lithuania and Latvia, three Baltic States with a combined population of 6.1-million that have, somehow, become the proverbial tail that wags the EU dog, itself with a combined population of some 600-million people who, in poll after poll in most countries, are overwhelmingly in favour of a negotiated settlement to the conflict right now, not that Kallas and her ilk care what their populations want.

👉WHAT IS BEST FOR EUROPE is to drop their Russia-phobic rhetoric and remember that Russia is both an Eastern and a Western society—it straddles both—and that it is a nuclear super-power with the most battle-hardened army in the world, and if they’re not careful, Russia may take the gloves off and it will be FAFO time!

 

EUROPEAN LEADERS, most of whom are dyed-in-the-wool Russiaphobes, need to shut the fuck up, get a grip on reality, and make nice with their giant neighbour next door.

  

CHEERS, JAKE. _____________________________________ 

 

* A moniker for Ms. Kalas coined by Alex Christoforou on his go-to Youtube channel alongside The Duran channel he shares with Alexander Mercouris (who also has his own, go-to channel.)

 

👉1. The eastward expansion of NATO in the decades after the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s was something Russia complained about; for Russia, it was an existential threat, this continuing encroachment of NATO forces closer to its borders. All of Russia’s complaints were ignored by the West in it's hubristic rush to cement into perpetuity the uni-polar supremecy of the United States that occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union. Some commentators suggest this unipolarity lasted until the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and it's been downhill ever since for the world's sole hegemon (USA).

 

2. And what do you think will happen to all the weapons and money floating around Ukraine? What will happen when Ukraine collapses? The EU, with its denial of reality and its inability to deal with facts on the ground, and its failure to compromise and settle the conflict diplomatically and to compel the regime in Kiev to reach a peace settlement with Russia—something the U.S. could have done by cutting off weapons supply and money to Ukraine, and is still is something the EU has in its power to do—has set the stage for a generation or more of heightened criminality and non-state actor violence and civil disorder emerging from the fractured Ukrainian lands, where thousands of military-trained men see limited opportunities for employment and leading a normal life inside Ukraine, who then turn their eyes on the West in order to make a living in whatever way they can, criminal or otherwise. Keep you eyes peeled, folks, 'cause it’s coming!