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A coalition of Palestinian and progressive groups is urging universities, think tanks, elected officials and others, to refuse to hire or collaborate with a group of 20 former Biden officials accused of "promoting, lying about and covering up the Gaza genocide."
The "Drop the Genocide 20" campaign has targeted former Biden staffers including Antony Blinken, who served as secretary of state, Jake Sullivan, former national security advisor, and Brett McGurk, Biden's Middle East coordinator — all of whom were pivotal in backing Israel's war on Gaza.
Since his time as secretary of state, Blinken was given a book deal with Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and has often participated in public speaking events including at Harvard's Kennedy School.
The campaign is also demanding the Biden staffers be banned from any future political appointments.
"The culture of bipartisan elite immunity is what drives U.S. war crimes and support for war crimes. … This dynamic is a key reason Biden officials knew they could arm, defend, and cover up the genocide in Gaza for 15 months, and simply move back into liberal spaces, nonprofits, and future governments.”
Congressmember Rashida Tlaib is among those to have signed the pledge.
United Russia, the party of President Putin, will win again, but maybe without a super-majority (310 seats) it needs to make constitutional changes without having to rely on support from other parties. Most of the opposition parties support Putin’s presidency to one degree or another. The Communists usually finish second, but may well perform worse this time as there is a scond Communist ‘A Just Russia’ group that could take some votes.
There is only one party opposed to the war in Ukraine, the ‘liberal’ Yabloko. Yabloko attracts a thin layer of young people who want to express their opposition by voting against United Russia. Yabloko was initially allowed to stand in the party ticket but was then excluded from this and many of its candidates in individual constituencies were also blocked.
Eleven members of the Yabloko have become defendants in criminal cases and 12 party members have been added to the register of foreign agents, among them party chairman Nikolay Rybakov, and his deputies Boris Vishnevskiy, Vladimir Dorokhov, and Lev Shlosberg. Another deputy of Rybakov, Maxim Kruglov was sentenced to 7 years in prison by the Zamoskvoretsky Court of Moscow on June 24, 2026, for publishing information on social media about civilian casualties in Ukraine during the Russian invasion, including in Mariupol and Bucha. But there are still a handful of Yabloko candidates still standing, any election leaflets for Yabloko are being gobbled up even though distributors can get temporarily arrested by the police for 3 hours just to disrupt their agitation.
The most famous antiwar dissident is the Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky, arrested in July 2023 and now serving five years in a prison colony. But there are others. In November 2025, members of a small Marxist study circle in the city of Ufa were sentenced to 24 years, accused of “terrorism” and “conspiracy to overthrow the government” for reading works of Marx.
But the majority of voters still support the war and with the Duma election result inevitable, apathy dominates and political stagnation is the order of the day. The Russian economy mirrors the poiltical stagnation. The war in Ukraine goes towards completing its fifth year with no resolution in sight. At the start of the war, Western analysts forecast a quick collapse in the economy and the ruble. They continue to forecast calamity five years later. But the Russian economy has survived and has every prospect of being sufficiently stable to continue the war through 2026 and beyond. Russia has a relatively low stock of debt and taxes can be raised again. The central bank can print money and the government can continue to nationalise businesses to strengthen the war economy.
On the other hand, after a boom period based on the massive switch into an arms economy, in the last year or two economic growth has slowed, inflation remains high and civilian investment has been drained for the war effort. Russia’s economy entered 2026 weaker than it was a year before, with growth declining and oil prices well below budgeted projections. In effect, the Russian economy, like many others in the OECD, is in “stagflation” (where price inflation stays high, but output stagnates). Russia’s ‘military Keynesianism’ is no longer delivering, as before.
First-half economic growth was half the pace recorded a year earlier and almost seven times slower than during the wartime economic boom of 2023-24. The war in Iran has temporarily pushed Russia’s oil revenues to their highest level since the start of the war in Ukraine, enabling the federal budget spend to rise 16%, with about one-third going to the military and weapons production. As a result, Russia’s military-industrial sector has continued to expand.
Civilian manufacturing, however, remains in contraction, falling 3.2% from a year earlier and 4.6% compared with 2024 levels, according to May estimates from the Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting.
In its ‘baseline scenario’, the Russian Ministry of Economic Development lowered its forecast for Russia’s GDP growth in 2026 to 0.4% from 1.3% and for 2027 to 1.4% from 2.8%. So no collapse, but no boom. Small businesses, already struggling, will remain burdened by higher taxes and finding it difficult to secure credit. There is a severe shortage of labour to sustain businesses. Indeed, 68.7% of small and medium-sized businesses reported loss of revenue in 2026; it is likely many will close down.
Russia’s annual inflation rate rose to 6.3% in August 2026, its highest level since November 2025, up from 6% in the previous month. Inflation remains stubbornly high, so keeping interest rates up, squeezing small firms and households.
However, average wage rises are still outsripping price rises, so for many, especially those working in the arms sectors, real incomes continue to rise.
As for the impact of the war, there are rumours during the Duma election that the government may announce forced mobilisation to cover casualty losses. Putin has denied this will happen. It would certainly increase anti-war sentiment. In the meantime, war spending is now over 7% of annual GDP. Despite increased taxation, the sharply rising spending to pay for the war is draining Russia’s sovereign wealth fund.
But the Russian economy still has enough funding to maintain the war and there is little reason to expect any collapse. It will be a different matter if and when the war ends. War production is basically unproductive for capital accumulation over the long run. Russia’s economy will revert to civilian capital accumulation when the war ends. Then Russia’s productive sectors will be exposed. A post-war slump is very likely.
The Russian economy remains fundamentally natural resource-linked. It relies on extraction rather than manufacturing. Russia remains technologically backward and dependent on high-tech imports. Russia is not a substantial player in any of the cutting-edge technologies, from artificial intelligence to biotechnology. It has yet to produce technologies fit for a competitive export market beyond arms and nuclear energy. The underlying message is that Russian economy and its politics will remain stagnant for the rest of this decade.
The TUC conference this week passed a composite resolution supporting the campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. For the first time in its history, this organisation of over five million workers, has expressed concrete support for a boycott of Israel, rather than just the West Bank settlements, and although it may have been late in coming, it is a very welcome development.
The TUC has not moved in this direction by accident. It is the cumulative effect of tens of thousands of protests, rallies and demonstrations in the last three years. Taking all of the individual actions together – and many of these demonstrations each involved hundreds of thousands of people – the protests against Israel have amounted to the biggest single political protest in British history. It could hardly be otherwise, given the events in Palestine in the last three years, much of which has been relayed on TV screens and through social media to the world outside.
Following the Hamas attack in southern Israel nearly three years ago, Israel used that incursion as a pretext to conduct a one-sided genocidal war against the entire population of Gaza. At least 73,000 people were killed – and likely thousands more – the big majority not Hamas members or activists, but mostly women and children. That narrow strip of land was bombed into rubble, leaving two million desperate survivors concentrated in an even smaller sliver of land, surrounded by tanks and dependent entirely on humanitarian aid. If that is not the very definition of genocide, then nothing is.
Gaza Strip totally destroyed
Having literally destroyed the Gaza Strip, the Israeli government intensified its terror on the Palestinian population of the West Bank, where there is an ongoing process of ethnic-cleansing, driving Palestinians out of villages and off farmland. Tens of thousands have been displaced, as Jewish settlers continue to organise nightly pogroms, actively supported by the Israeli ‘Defence’ Force and armed with assault rifles by the government in Jerusalem.
It is because the world has seen what has happened that there have been massive and unprecedented protests around the globe and not just in Britain. Political and diplomatic support for Israel has collapsed everywhere, and the tens of millions of protesters have pushed, demanded and cajoled their governments, often grudgingly, into at least expressing concern, if not direct opposition to Israeli policies.
It is in response to such protests that the UK government announced last week that it was planning to impose sanctions on Israeli settlements, within six to nine months.
Even before and since the last general election, the Labour Party had been losing votes, to the Green Party, and also to independents, specifically over its support for Israel. This dramatically worsened for Labour as the Green Party, led by Zack Polanski, surged in support over the last year.
Despite murmuring and hand-wringing over the genocide in Gaza, Labour ministers, notably Keir Starmer and David Lammy, were enablers of Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank, through continued military support for Israel and military cooperation, including the spy-plane flights over Gaza launched from RAF Akrotiri, in Cyprus.
Gaza a major factor in collapsing support for Labour
The unstinting support for Israel, despite Gaza and despite the West Bank pogroms, has been a major factor in the collapse of Labour’s support. A poll carried out by Opinium at the end of May, found that over 40 percent of those who voted Labour in the 2024 general election had switched to the Green Party in the last local elections. 53% of “progressive” voters abandoning Labour cite their Gaza policy as a factor. Starmer must have been aware of this, but would do nothing to upset the Labour Friends of Netanyahu.
A report in the Guardian notes that “The Greens are just four points behind Labour in urban constituencies across the UK, putting them within touching distance of taking as many as 40 seats if the result was replicated at the next election”. As an aside, this poll was commissioned by the right wing faction ThinkLabour (formerly the mis-named Labour Together), before the recent Burnham bounce in the opinion polls and it gives a clue as to why it was one of their supporters who stood aside in Makerfield so that Andy Burnham could re-enter Parliament and push Starmer out.
The new leadership under Andy Burnham is keen to burnish at least some kind of radical credentials and hence we had the announcement by Ed Miliband, now Foreign Secretary, that the UK would boycott the Israeli settlements on the West Bank and Israeli-occupied Syria. There is an obvious problem with boycotting such goods, of course, because the produce (most agricultural) from the occupied territories would be simply transported over the border and labelled “Israeli”.
Supporters of Palestine will legitimately ask, where was Miliband while Gaza was being pummelled with high explosives, and its people were being killed in their thousands? He was, after all, a minister in Starmer’s cabinet for all this time. There is a New Testament phrase about “swallowing a camel and choking on a gnat” and it seems to apply perfectly to Ed Miliband and much of the Labour leadership.
The Israeligovernmentis the prime cause of West Bank pogroms
More importantly, the belated sanctions on Israeli settlements do nothing to address the prime cause of the ethnic cleansing on the West Bank – the Israeli government itself. “The Israeli people”, senior Labour Cabinet minister Louise Haigh said to the conference, “are not responsible for the actions of their government”. That is a back-handed admission that it is precisely the Israeli government that is behind the settler pogroms.
Within the Israeli political spectrum there are violent anti-Arab racists and religious fanatics who, judging by their own words, would – if they were allowed to – put every Palestinian on a bus and forcibly transport them somewhere else, or even physically wipe them out. Haigh knows full well that some of these people are in the Israeli government, arming and encouraging settlers – or she wouldn’t have made any reference to the government.
And why boycott Israeli settlers for their actions in the West Bank yet not boycott the Israeli government for the horrendous crimes committed by its own military in Gaza? It makes no sense.
Poster from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign
The question she needs to answer – and Ed Miliband, and Andy Burnham – is why the British government is continuing to provide military, logistical and intelligence support to a government responsible for these appalling policies. When it comes to the responsibility of the “Israeli people”, Haigh is being equally disingenuous. There is no long-term sustainable future for the mass of Israeli workers on the basis of a militarised state and the forced occupation and/or ethnic cleansing of a reluctant population.
The problem is that a majority of Israeli voters have not yetcome to realise that – and the only way they can be shifted from their illusions in the dead-end of militaristic Zionism is through a sustained and complete boycott of the Israeli state itself. On the relatively small left fringe of Israeli politics there actually is support for an outside BDS campaign, because it is seen as the only hope of holding back a reactionary and ultimately unsustainable policy.
Louise Haigh told the TUC Congress, “We will stand against injustice…“ She might start by acknowledging the character of the Israeli state. Currently the Israeli government controls a population half of which has either no democratic rights, or, in the case of Arab citizens of Israel, fewer rights compared to Jewish citizens. It is an apartheid state. Yet the policies of Netanyahu, loathsome though they are, are only the logical extension of a decades-old policy of a brutal colonisation at the expense of the original population of Palestine, always dressed in the garb of a religious or national Jewish ‘redemption’.
An indication of a profound shift in public opinion
We should not pretend that a UK trade boycott of the Jewish settlements is anything more than a token. But neither should we underestimate its significance. Like the TUC motion, it is an indication of a profound shift of mass opinion, as a result of protests and campaigns against the Gaza genocides and the West Bank pogroms. That campaign has shifted the dial of public discourse on Israel and Palestine and it is not going to move back any time soon.
Eleven other countries – Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden – have joined the UK in supporting or considering sanctions on trade in goods with settlements. It is not the end of the road – far from it – but it is an important milestone in the struggle for the rights of the Palestinian people.
Even in the United States, the main economic and military enabler of Israel’s aggressive ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East, there is growing opposition to Israel’s policies. The accusation of ‘antisemitism’, thrown at anyone who criticises Israel, doesn’t wash any more. Democratic Party candidates are winning primaries and elections on the basis of opposing the Israel lobby in the USA and its policies in Palestine.
There, it was the Republican Party who were the main cheer-leaders of Netanyahu, but the huge shift in public opinion has even unsettled Trump’s party. According to the Israeli liberal newspaper, Haaretz, (August 31) even Republican candidates are now trying to distance themselves from the powerful Israeli lobbying organisation, AIPAC. “Republican leaders” Haaretz argues, “are confronting a worsening Israel problem within their own coalition…”
The reason is clear: the Pew Research Centre, a prestigious US polling organisation, found that as long ago as April “57 percent of Republicans ages 18 to 49 viewed Israel unfavourably, compared with 41 percent of Republicans overall”. The worm is turning, not because politicians have had a sudden change of heart, but because of masspublic pressure.
National TUC event on Palestine in November
Returning to Britain, the Middle East Eye reports that the successful TUC motion is to be followed by a national event on November 26, when trade unionists will be invited to take part in a TUC-backed workplace day of action in solidarity with Palestine. Having noted the strength of feeling on this issue – delegates from many trade unions spoke in Congress in support of the composite motion – the TUC now has to ‘put its money where its mouth is’. It should issue circulars, posters and information about Gaza and the West Bank, to circulate in workplaces and to assist in the organisation of work-place meetings, sit-downs and walk-outs where the workforce and the trade union organisations are strong enough.
Ed Miliband’s belated boycott and the TUC motion are important in themselves, but the struggle for Palestinian rights has still got a long way to go. November 26 should be made into another important milestone, to expose the role of the Israeli state in Palestine and to solidify further the BDS movement.
From the TUCwebsite, the wording of the Composite motion 18 on Palestine:
Congress notes the:
i. catastrophic destruction of Gaza, including infrastructure, hospitals, schools, and universities, following Israel’s genocidal assault since 2023, killing over 70,000 Palestinians, displacing millions, and increase in illegal settlements, military occupation and apartheid
ii. findings by UN bodies and human rights organisations documenting grave violations of international law including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity
iii. Israeli settlers’ violence and attacks, supported by the IDF, on Palestinian communities, has caused the deaths of several children and closure of many schools, leaving students and teaching staff terrorised
iv. global Palestinian-led movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions initiated by Palestinian civil society including trade unions
v. ongoing government efforts to discourage and censure Palestine solidarity, including within art and culture.
Congress believes:
a. the need to answer the call of Palestinian workers for solidarity
b. BDS is an effective strategy to pressure Israel to end its ongoing genocide, system of apartheid, occupation and denial of the right of return for refugees
c. the trade union movement has a proud history of BDS campaigns against oppression, including against apartheid South Africa.
Congress resolves to:
1. campaign for a permanent ceasefire and just peace plan that respects international law and successive UN resolutions, providing for a two-state solution
2. campaign for legislation banning trade with the illegal settlements and suspension of the UK-Israel Trade and Partnership Agreement, until international law is respected
3. support the Palestinian led BDS movement; trade union-led campaigns in support of Palestine; the workplace days of action; divestment from companies complicit in Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, in cooperation with union members in those companies
4. end all military cooperation and arms trade with Israel to comply with international law
5. call on the government to impose wide-ranging sanctions on Israel until it complies with international law, and commit to freedom of speech and end attempts to censor artists and art organisations expressing solidarity with Palestine
6. support trade unionists, including artists, culture workers and education workers who refuse to handle goods and services linked to violations of international law.
We must keep prising the fingers of the billionaire class off our throats until it is only the discredited, and morally bankrupt, who refuse to speak loudly in opposition to genocide
Johnathan Cook Sept 17 2026
It is hard not to be excited at the very public shaming of a major celebrity, pop star Ed Sheeran, over his agreement to remove a friend and support act, Macklemore, from his current US tour. During his set, Macklemore spoke out eloquently against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
This feels like a very belated turning-point. During the three years of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, the corporate world has maintained its grip over the West’s cultural spaces – in part, to conceal its own complicity in those crimes.
Now that chokehold has been exposed – and it looks every bit as ugly as, indeed, it is.
Might the backlash against Macklemore’s treatment be a sign that the dam is finally about to burst?
During two appearances on Sheeran’s tour, Macklemore expressed opposition to Israel’s genocide before an audience of many tens of thousands. He called out “Free Palestine!” as he performed a song, Hind’s Hall, inspired by the Israeli military’s notorious, and cold-blooded, murder of a six-year girl, Hind Rajab, in Gaza.
As a result, Robert Kraft, the owner of one of the stadiums for an upcoming date on the tour, refused to host Macklemore. The billionaire appears to have organised a boycott by other venues.
Kraft is known to be close to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, currently sought by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in starving Gaza’s population. At an awards ceremony honouring Kraft in 2019, Netanyahu noted: “Israel does not have a more loyal friend.”
Shameful hypocrisy
Sheeran caved in the face of Kraft’s corporate diktat, justifying his decision by saying he had a policy of not “taking sides” in his professional life. There are all-too-evident problems with his claim.
First, the musician has repeatedly taken sides in major political matters, not least in showing support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.
Mukhtar
@I_amMukhtar
Ed "I don't take sides and do politics" Sheeran.
8:42 PM · Sep 14, 2026 · 1.98M Views
1.21K Replies · 7.39K Reposts · 42.2K Likes
His cancelling of Macklemore makes sense only if Sheeran believes the vast scale of suffering in Gaza is of much less significance than the more limited suffering in Ukraine. Even on the most conservative estimate possible, 30 children have been killed in Gaza for every child killed in Ukraine.
Sheeran risks looking not just like he’s applying a double standard but like he’s engaging in outright anti-Palestinian racism.
Why did “apolitical” Sheeran feel impelled to speak out himself in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, but now feels impelled to stop others from speaking out in solidarity with the people of Gaza? Cowardice barely suffices to explain his shameful hypocrisy.
Second, in agreeing to Macklemore’s removal from the tour, Sheeran has not avoided taking a side. He has very clearly taken a side – the side of billionaire Kraft, Israel’s most “loyal friend”, in ensuring yet again a voice against genocide is denied a major platform.
As the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu observed in relation to the apartheid regime of South Africa: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
And third, to defend Macklemore, Sheeran did not need to get directly involved in the “politics” of what he calls the Israel-Palestine “conflict”. He could simply have backed his friend on the grounds of artistic freedom.
After all, Sheeran gave Macklemore a spot on the tour, knowing full well that one of his most famous songs – one he was almost certain to play – was Hind’s Hall. Sheeran knew that it would be impossible for Macklemore to avoid politics on the tour because Macklemore’s music is political.
Financial muscle
Sheeran had a choice to defend a fellow artist’s freedom. And he chose not to do so.
He is now being harshly judged for that – not least by his own backing band and other support acts. They all pulled out of the tour in solidarity with Macklemore. Unlike Sheeran, they understood what was at stake.
One, Aaron Rowe, an Irish musician, noted of his reasoning:
I cannot stand by and allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence the rightful voices of those who speak up against Israeli genocide and who highlight the savage murder of children. I would lose all respect for myself to carry on as normal.
That is a lesson Sheeran may be belatedly grasping. After three years of genocide, we are seeing the first signs of a welcome fissure open up between political and economic power, on one side, and social and cultural power on the other.
Earlier acts of protests against genocide by musicians – such as by Kneecap and Bob Vylan – have received plenty of publicity, but overwhelmingly negative coverage from an establishment media as steeped in complicity for the genocide as the West’s politicians and billionaire class.
The row embroiling Sheeran, however, has so far moved in a different direction, with the media colouring their reports in grey rather than the usual black and white.
Part of the reason is that, despite claims by Kraft and the Israel lobby that Macklemore’s remarks to concert-goers were antisemitic, the media are struggling this time to find anything they can misrepresent as offensive. And without such a distraction, they cannot deflect their audiences from drawing the obvious inference: that a pro-Israel billionaire has crushed First Amendment free-speech rights through sheer financial muscle.
The usual lobbyists claiming that Macklemore’s exclamation of “Free Palestine!” is antisemitic and poses a threat to Jews are simply hollowing out their own credibility, further undermining Sheeran’s vacuous “apolitical” stance, and bolstering Macklemore.
BBC Radio 4 Today
@BBCr4today
The Israeli-American Council chief exec, who led calls for Macklemore to be dropped from Ed Sheeran's tour, describes 'Free Palestine' as an anti-Semitic statement. Elan Carr tells @JustinOnWeb that freedom of speech doesn't give the rapper the right to 'hijack' a stage.
7:21 AM · Sep 16, 2026 · 262K Views
584 Replies · 63 Reposts · 492 Likes
After three years of Gaza being levelled, its children bombed, its survivors eking out a living among the rubble, only an idiot or liar fails to see that Palestine urgently needs liberating.
Even the West’s complicit political class are saying, in effect, “Free Palestine!” every time they call for a two-state solution – though, of course, in their case, they do not really have any intention of freeing the Palestinians from Israel’s decades-long illegal occupation.
No fog of war
But there is another reason Macklemore, unlike his predecessors, is gaining an edge in the coverage of his battle against Kraft and Sheeran.
The truth of the Gaza genocide has become impossible to hide, even for the so-called legacy media. Years of omissions, equivocations and lies by the corporate news machine helped Israel get most of the way through the erasure of Gaza, if not yet the expulsion of its people.
For months the dust has been settling, both figuratively and literally. Claims about the fog of war – always bogus – can no longer be credibly wielded by Israel or the news media.
There is no battle to free the Israeli hostages – justifying all the “collateral damage” of many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian children – because there are no hostages in Gaza.
There is no meaningful fight against Hamas because Israel has once again managed to pen the people Gaza into a concentration camp – this one only a third of the size of their original tiny concentration camp.
And, of course, Israel has been stripped of even a pretend-excuse for excluding foreign journalists from Gaza. Transparently, the only reason they are being kept out is Israel’s fear of making the horrors there visible firsthand to the western media.
Gaza is slowly moving from the daily news cycle into the history books. There, it will be remembered not as a war but as a genocide.
In response, western establishments – its politicians and media – are slowly reinventing their positions to avoid being too obviously on the wrong side of history.
That was evident in the British government’s recent decision, very late in the day, to support the International Court of Justice’s 2024 ruling that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is unlawful.
The UK is now promising to do the bare minimum to accord with that judgment by imposing sanctions on Israel’s illegal settlements over their part in ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank – though not, mind, on Israel itself for establishing those settlements.
Likewise, the news media is putting a little more critical distance between itself and Israel.
As coverage of the Macklemore-Sheeran bust-up suggests, that crack offers a chance, and one that needs to be exploited.
Cowardice shamed
For the first time, Sheeran’s public shaming shows there may be a price to pay for demonstrating cowardice on the issue of genocide.
That is important. For three years, the billionaire class that rule over us have used the blunt instrument of their financial muscle – force – to dominate not only the political discourse about Gaza but the cultural one too.
The billionaires – the Robert Krafts – own the platforms on which our cultural life is expressed: the legacy media, social media, Hollywood, music labels, publishing houses, venues, and so on.
They use that power to great effect, to prevent any real criticism of the neoliberal capitalist order that enriches them, of the war industries they own that levelled Gaza, of the empire they built that endlessly pillages others’ resources and is rapidly undermining the conditions for life on the planet.
Their stranglehold over our cultural spaces, enforcing a silence against the genocide, is designed to encourage fans to assume that artists and celebrities have little sympathy for the suffering for the Palestinians and reject the idea that Israel is carrying out a genocide.
In a western culture where, rightly or wrongly, large parts of the public see their preferred artists and celebrities as role models, and often look to them for guidance, this enforced silence is exploited by the ruling class as its alibi for inaction.
The cost of pointing out what we can all see in Gaza has been simply too high: no chance of that first big break; calls unreturned; lost work; cancelled contracts; antisemitism smears.
In short, pariahdom.
Macklemore may finally have chipped away at that calculation. In his confrontation with Sheeran, he comes out smelling of roses – and Sheeran emerges as the snivelling toad.
Billionaires punishing artists for taking an honourable stance against genocide – as has happened with actors such as Susan Sarandon and Melissa Barrera, and musicians such as Zarah Larsson and CMAT – has a purpose. It is intended to send a powerful message to others that they should keep their heads down.
Now Sheeran’s shaming has sent a counter-message to his fellow creatives. Being pimped by the billionaires for genocide is a bad look.
The billionaire class’s grip is weakening. We must keep prising its fingers off our throats until it is only the discredited, and the morally bankrupt, who refuse to speak loudly in opposition to genocide.
Yesterday, Ed Sheeran made the neutral decision of dropping Macklemore from his US tour, explaining he needs someone “less divisive”. You will therefore be delighted to hear that Pink will be taking Macklemore’s place. She’ll be performing at the ten remaining shows, although it’s unclear whether anyone will bother to attend.
A thrilled Pink accepted the offer shortly after using her kid as a prop at the US Open—she even dyed his hair pink so he got all the attention. It’s nice having a living child, isn’t it? Especially when that kid can shield you from hecklers.
The best thing about siding with Israel is that you can go to events like the US Open. But the moment you criticise Israel, you’re basically a pariah. Now you understand why most celebs take the easy path.
Ed’s just being sensible here. He never gets involved in controversial topics like war, unless it involves waving the Ukraine flag. It’s simply not okay to take a stance on Gaza the way Ed took a stance on Ukraine.
Macklemore should’ve known he was hurting the feelings of genocide supporters with statements like “all children deserve to live”. Pink chose a more unifying approach, which involved attacking opponents of genocide, implying they must be antisemites, and trying to get them cancelled. In the case of Macklemore, she succeeded.
Obviously, Pink can’t take all the credit here though. It was ultimately the decision of proud Zionist Robert Kraft who told Ed to drop Macklemore or else he wouldn’t be allowed to perform at his venues.
Ed’s not exactly short of a few bob, but he still took the morally correct position of protecting his bank balance. He dropped Macklemore harder than a 2,000lb dumb bomb on a school in Gaza.
He later explained that Macklemore hurt the feelings of the people who count: genocide supporters. Thankfully, his replacement Pink only hurt the feelings of people with a conscience—and who gives a fuck about those?
Anyways, it turns out that Ed and Robert go back a long way. For example, Ed performed at Robert’s wedding a few years ago. Weddings are so nice, aren’t they? When they’re not being blown up by American-made bombs.
Heart-warmingly, Ed called Robert “super sweet” and explained his Gillette stadium was the first US venue he played at. Another lovely detail is that Robert Kraft is named in the Epstein files. Thankfully, that’s not a deal breaker for Ed, just like genocide isn’t. The only deal breaker is opposition to genocide. That’s really going too far.
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