Macklemore’s free speech was never the issue. His Israel rhetoric was

By Pearce Alexander in Toronto, Canada

Macklemore’s freedom of speech was not violated.

On September 4, the 43-year-old American rapper was opening for Ed Sheeran at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey when he shouted “Free Palestine” and performed his anti-Israel protest song “Hind’s Hall,” while footage from Gaza and the West Bank was shown on the stadium screens.

“Hind’s Hall” explicitly accuses Israel of relying on an apartheid system and characterizes the war in Gaza as genocide.

Ten days later, on September 14, Macklemore was removed from the remainder of Sheeran’s U.S. Loop Tour. Tour promoter Messina Touring Group said upcoming venues had informed the promoter that they would not host the concerts if Macklemore remained on the lineup.

Kraft, who owns Gillette Stadium, said that Macklemore would not be welcome at his venue, and other venue owners also objected to Macklemore’s continued presence on the tour.

If Macklemore wants to continue calling the situation in Gaza a genocide and turning music concerts into political rallies, he’s free to do so.

But Kraft, who is a proud Jew, does not have to give him the platform.

Would you invite someone into your house if you knew they disagreed with your worldview and turned every conversation into an airing of grievances?

Probably not.

And this wasn’t even Macklemore’s concert. He was the opening act.

How much arrogance do you have to have to turn someone else’s concert into a political rally?

The chutzpah.

Macklemore has been spewing this nonsense for a while.

In 2014, he went onstage in a costume built around old Jewish stereotypes: a dark suit, a bushy wig and beard, and a large prosthetic nose. Macklemore later apologized, saying that it was not his intention to portray a Jewish caricature. But the apology is hard to believe.

What else could he have intended?

Then, in 2025, Macklemore released “F—ed Up.” Near the end of the music video, a Palestinian child in Jenin is placed side by side with one of the most recognizable photographs of the Holocaust: the Jewish boy with his hands raised in the Warsaw Ghetto. The image appears as Macklemore raps about genocide.

Calling Israel’s actions genocide is a flat-out lie.

The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, “in whole or in part,” a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

Wars happen, and innocent civilians unfortunately die. But you cannot claim “genocide” simply because innocent civilians have died; there must be specific intent to destroy the group.

By Macklemore’s apparent definition, every war would be a genocide, because all wars produce civilian deaths.

The evidence does not establish that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

On the contrary, Israel has taken significant measures to warn, help, and protect civilians.

According to COGAT, the Israeli government unit responsible for coordinating and facilitating humanitarian activity in Gaza, approximately 1.87 million metric tons of humanitarian goods entered Gaza between the beginning of the war and July 23, 2025. Nearly 80 per cent of that was food, nearly 10 per cent was shelter equipment, and the remainder included medical supplies, water, cooking gas, and other forms of aid.

Israel and Hamas agreed to three separate pauses in fighting so roughly 640,000 Palestinian children could be vaccinated against polio.

Israel dropped approximately 9.3 million evacuation leaflets, sent more than 15.5 million evacuation text messages, sent approximately 17 million recorded voice messages, and placed approximately 100,000 evacuation phone calls warning civilians to evacuate combat areas.

Israel also helped nearly 5,000 sick or wounded Gazans leave Gaza for medical treatment abroad.

This is just some of the work Israel has done to help innocent Palestinians.

An army intending to kill civilians would not go to such great lengths to warn and protect them.

Macklemore actually has it the other way around: the evidence of genocidal intent is far clearer in Hamas’s October 7 attack.

On October 7, Hamas terrorists crossed into southern Israel and attacked civilians in their homes, in kibbutzim, on roads, and at the Nova music festival. About 1,200 people were killed and roughly 250 were taken hostage into Gaza.

On a per-capita basis, the death toll from October 7 was roughly 11 times that of September 11 when comparing Israel’s population with the population of the United States at the time of 9/11.

Hamas clearly intended to destroy, at least in part, Jews as a group.

After the attacks, Israeli authorities released a recording they said came from a Hamas attacker who called his parents. He boasted that he had killed 10 Jews “with my own hands.”

Just weeks after the October 7 attacks, Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said October 7 would be repeated “again and again.” He called it only the first of many such attacks and said the existence of Israel was illegitimate.

The planning documents point in the same direction. Documents found on Hamas fighters included detailed plans for Israeli communities and instructions to kill and capture civilians. In Be’eri, a dead Hamas terrorist was found carrying a notebook with the order: “Kill as many people and take as many hostages as possible.”

Then, there’s Hamas’s own charter.

In Article 7 of Hamas’s 1988 Charter, it invokes a religious passage saying that Muslims will fight and kill Jews. The passage continues by describing a Jew hiding behind a stone or tree, with the stone or tree calling on a Muslim to come and kill the Jew.

The charter also declares that Israel will continue to exist until Islam obliterates it.

In 2017, Hamas issued a new political document. It was not a formal repeal of the 1988 charter, but it changed the language significantly, saying that Hamas’s conflict was with Zionism rather than with Jews as a people. But Zionism, at its core, is the belief in Jewish self-determination and the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state.

And yet, the document still refused to recognize Israel and continued to define Palestine as extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

That distinction matters when looking at October 7 and Israel’s response.

Hamas deliberately entered Israeli communities to murder civilians and take hostages. Human Rights Watch found that intentional killing and hostage-taking of civilians were central aims of the planned attack.

The IDF’s mission was to kill Hamas terrorists and rescue the Israelis they had kidnapped.

There is a huge moral difference between trying to kill civilians and trying to kill terrorists.

That moral distinction is exactly what gets lost in slogans like “Free Palestine,” a phrase Macklemore used during his September 4 performance as Sheeran’s opener.

“Free Palestine” is generally used as a call for Palestinian freedom, self-determination and national rights. But that still leaves a basic question: what does a “free Palestine” actually look like?

If “Free Palestine” means replacing Israel with a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, then here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Israel is the sovereign state that exists there.

There is only one Jewish state in the world, and it is roughly the size of New Jersey.

If freeing Palestine means wiping the State of Israel off the map, then there would be no Jewish state.

Logically speaking, where would the millions of Jews already living there go?

Or are they expected to live under whatever government replaces Israel?

So if Palestine is supposed to control all of that territory, where exactly does the sovereign State of Israel exist, if at all?

Macklemore himself has said, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

So in Macklemore’s version of “Free Palestine,” Israel just doesn’t exist.

Got it.

But even if “Free Palestine” means something less extreme — an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel — there is still another obvious problem: how exactly is that supposed to work after October 7?

Who governs that state?

What happens to Hamas?

How would the territory be secured?

And what guarantees would Israel have that another October 7 could not happen again?

“Free Palestine” takes an extraordinarily complicated political question and reduces it to a slogan about Palestinian self-determination without answering what happens to Israel.

Macklemore said at MetLife that his message was one of “peace, love” and treating all human beings with “dignity, respect, and equality.”

If he truly believes that, where is that same outrage for the Israelis who were injured, kidnapped, and murdered October 7?

And where is that same concern for Palestinians whose basic rights are violated by Hamas?

Macklemore has been a vocal supporter of gay rights for years. His 2012 song “Same Love” became closely associated with marriage equality and argued that being gay is a human right.

In Gaza, male same-sex activity is criminalized under a British Mandate-era law and can carry a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

Where is his concern for those basic human rights?

And yet, after Macklemore was removed, four other supporting acts — Finneas, Lukas Graham, Aaron Rowe and Beoga — withdrew from Sheeran’s tour, with several framing his removal as an attempt to silence pro-Palestinian speech.

Macklemore then released a lengthy public statement defending his position and accusing Kraft and other venue owners of pressuring the tour.

In that September 14 Instagram post, Macklemore’s statement again goes entirely in one direction. “The victims are the Palestinian people,” he wrote, with no mention of the Israeli civilians murdered on October 7 or the hostages dragged into Gaza.

People were burned alive. Families were ripped apart. Children lost parents. Parents lost children. People were kidnapped and dragged into Gaza. Hostages were abused and held underground for months. Survivors were scarred for life.

Macklemore can choose to care about only one side and make vile accusations.

He can choose to turn music concerts into political rallies.

Just not in Robert Kraft’s stadium.