Musical auto-da-fé. Brendan O’Neill on “Ed Sheeran’s forced conversion to the anti-Israel cult”

First came the pressure from U.S. football magnate Robert Kraft, who asked Ed Sheeran to ban rapper Macklemore (“Free Palestine” from the stage, dressed as a Jew with a hooked nose). Then came the militant pressure from his own audience. So Sheeran apologised at the first concert of the Loop Tour in the United States. “I’ve had to make some difficult decisions, I’ve made some mistakes and I’m really, really sorry,” the British singer said, visibly moved and greeted by applause. “What’s happening in Gaza is catastrophic.”

“We have just witnessed a forced conversion to a cult before the eyes of the whole world,” Brendan O’Neill, editor of the British magazine Spiked, columnist for The Telegraph and The Spectator, and author in Italy of "Manifesto di un eretico" (Liberilibri), tells Il Foglio. “Ed Sheeran has been forced to bow to the neo-religion of Palestinianism. What has happened over the past week is shocking and appalling. We were told it was a movement to defend Macklemore’s freedom of speech after he was excluded from Sheeran’s tour for saying ‘Free Palestine’, but in reality it was a crusade to bring Sheeran to his knees. To force him to bow obsequiously to the dominant ‘woke’ ideology, which is Israelophobia – the racist notion that the Jewish state is barbaric and that everyone has a duty to condemn it publicly.”

Sheeran’s initial statement on the controversy had infuriated pro-Palestinian supporters, because he had dared to mention the pogrom of 7 October and said that there had been “suffering” on “both sides”. “This is the greatest transgression in the eyes of the Palestinian crowd: acknowledging Jewish suffering,” says O’Neill. “Unforgivable in their eyes: it humanises the Jews, reminding us that they are ordinary people, just like us, and not genocidal maniacs who deserved what happened on 7 October.” 

Even by making a rather mild statement about ‘everyone’s suffering’, Sheeran was unwittingly blaspheming against the cult of Gaza. “Such nuance amounts to a crime in the Orwellian world of Gazology,” says Brendan O’Neill. “For a week, Sheeran was vilified and demonised. He was branded a coward, scum, an ‘accomplice’ to ‘genocide’. There were calls to boycott his concerts. An Irish radio station even pulled his songs. It was McCarthyist hysteria: the banning of a musician for failing to parrot the correct ideology. The atmosphere was so intense and whirlwind-like, reminiscent of Salem, that Sheeran gave in and opened his latest show with a statement condemning Israel. But even that wasn’t enough. Because he didn’t say ‘genocide’ and he didn’t say ‘Free Palestine’. Nothing less than complete acquiescence to hatred of Israel will satisfy these lunatics. When will people learn that the ideologues and burnt-out narcissists of the Free Palestine movement cannot be appeased?”

Something is amiss in the world of entertainment, from the twenty-five-minute round of applause for the film Naza in Venice to the Sheeran affair. “It has been taken over by the Gaza craze. As we have seen from the Sheeran scandal, it is now forbidden not to support ‘Free Palestine’. To be a ‘good person’, you must wear a keffiyeh, wave the Palestinian flag and spout defamatory nonsense about the Jewish state. The cultural elite now defines its entire moral outlook through opposition to Jewish sovereignty. This situation recalls very dark times, when being a ‘good person’ required one to be wary of Jews and suspicious of their ways. Virtually the entire music industry has bowed en masse to the cult of Gaza. What is particularly horrific is that the worst atrocity of 7 October was the attack on the Nova music festival – the rape and massacre of hundreds of young music lovers. Yet no festival or concert in the Western world has paid tribute to those music lovers. Instead, they have waved the flag under which those young Jews were slaughtered. It is truly extraordinary: just a few days after the worst massacre of young Jews since the Holocaust, the cultural ‘righteous’ were waving the flag of the very men who had massacred them. A horrific betrayal of the Jews.”

O’Neill calls it Israelophobia. “Israelophobia is the moral glue of the cultural establishment. You’re nobody unless you hate the Jewish state loudly and gleefully. I believe this intense contempt for Israel is a cancerous outgrowth of the modern contempt for the West itself. Israel is hated because it is seen, quite rightly, as the embodiment of all the values that the West itself once held dear. There is a reason why Zionism has become the most despised ideology on earth: because it embodies everything that is now fashionable to hate. The elites have turned their own cowardice, their own betrayal of the ideals of modernity, into a virtue. And they hate Israel for not having done the same. For clinging to the things we have abandoned in favour of bowing down to the false god of multiculturalism. Israel has become the scapegoat for those who hate themselves. It has been transformed into the bearer of modernity’s sins, which must be punished for the sins of modernity. Yet, for some of us, these are precisely the things that make Israel admirable. If our nations had a little Zionist spirit, a little more willingness to defend our culture from foreign threats and backward ideologies, we would be in a better position than we are today.”

People so rich, so powerful and so committed choose only those causes that shield them from public criticism – criticism that is always directed at the West. “The totalitarian impulse is now undeniable,” concludes O’Neill. “What the Sheeran scandal confirms is that we are not allowed any respite from the cultural diktat, particularly from pro-Palestinian ideology. Not even at pop concerts. Wherever you go – school, university, the high street, an art gallery, an Ed Sheeran concert – you will be subjected to lectures on ‘correct thinking’ from your moral superiors. Like all tyrants, these people refuse to recognise any private, non-political sphere. They see every aspect of life as yet another arena for indoctrination. But a world in which everyone must constantly profess their loyalty to the correct way of thinking is neither ‘kind’ nor ‘tolerant’. It is an Orwellian hell in which we are forced to repeat slogans under duress and punished if we fail. That even someone as successful and wealthy as Sheeran can be forced to bow to the new ideology is terrifying. That is how powerful it has become.”