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"Free Palestine" Has Become a Cult
(Spiked-UK) Tom Slater - Britain's most inoffensive, syrupy-sweet of musical exports, Ed Sheeran, was forced to open his show at Philadelphia's Lincoln Financial Field on Saturday with a pre-prepared statement: "I've tried in my career not to be a political commentator of any kind because I want my music and shows to be about unity, not division, about humanity, not politics." He called Oct. 7 "horrific" and name-checked Hamas's massacre at the Nova festival. Depressingly, many Western pop musicians seem not to see themselves, or their audiences, in the nearly 400 ravers who were butchered by jihadists in Israel that day. The keffiyeh classes are incandescent that Sheeran dared mention the Israeli victims at all, and that he refused to utter the magic words, "Free Palestine." This confirms that Palestinianism is now a cult masquerading as humanitarian concern for the people of Gaza. The insistence we mouth their slogans. The vitriol sprayed at anyone who deviates from the group's monomania. This is no longer about the right of Pally-mad artists to utter their "anti-Zionist" blather in public. This is about forcing the entire music industry to conform to their warped, Jew-baiting worldview, or else. Sheeran has been hounded not for saying something, but for not saying something - for asserting his right to stay out of politics and stick to the tunes. This is about conformity. The pro-Palestine cause took flight from reason some time ago. It is now fueled by sheer, blind hatred. Hatred of the Jewish state. Hatred of anyone who sticks up for it, or refuses to agree it should be wiped from the map. Hatred of Jews, if we're being honest, in many cases. What else could explain the viciousness, the eye-rolling when you dare bring up Hamas's murders and rapes? That even Ed Sheeran is being slurred as "complicit," as drenched in Palestinian blood, is almost darkly comic. This is a man who writes soppy love songs. We do not need to know what he thinks about the world's most intractable conflict, nor did he seem keen to tell us. The cult of Palestinianism might be growing, but there are millions more out there who can see through its bullying, its bigotry - who get that the conflict in the Middle East is, at the very least, a lot more complicated than their most annoying Facebook friend insists.