Is there a German word for when someone you loathe does something you admire? ‘Feindbewunderung’ perhaps? I’ve been taken aback to feel it twice in recent weeks, and both times inspired by pop singers, of all the unlikely characters. Both times, less surprisingly to anyone who knows what an incorrigible philo-Semite I am, the issue was Israel.
Now Ed Sheeran (who seemed happy to be supported on his tour by the fantastically pro-Pally ‘white rapper’ Macklemore) is being reviled by the practitioners of what I call ‘Fresh’n’funky anti-Semitism’
Earlier this year came ‘Boy’ George O’Dowd with his song about the October 7th pogrom ‘We Will Dance Again’ (‘You condemn the Jews, with selective memory/Musicians holding flags, mouthing like sheep’) which got him a telling off from a former member of the Scottish parliament – ooo, scary! – who called him both ‘shameful’ and ‘shameless’. Due to appear as Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar at the Palladium, George cancelled after massive backlash, also sacking the manager of his record label after said manager declared loftily ‘I want nothing to do with this song.’
Of course Boy George has a history of squabbles (and worse, taking a bad position on both ‘trans’ issues and on chaining male escorts to radiators) but last week he posted a statement on X which made it clear how serious, sound and worthy of my German word he is on this subject:
‘In the last few months, my life has changed beyond all compare. I made a decision to support my Jewish friends and without hesitation. I feel anxious almost everywhere I go but I do not regret my decision. I have seen friends that I have helped and supported turn on me. It hurts because I know that not only do they know Jewish people but they have benefited hugely from the association with Jews. Many of these anti-Israel people have zero political instincts. They only care because it has become fashionable to care. I would go as far to say that they are the biggest and most hideous cowardly fakes to walk this earth. Why are people who support their Jewish friends being called to account while these fakes, like Ed Sheeran and countless others get to pretend to care about a situation they could not comprehend even if they really tried.’
And now Ed Sheeran (who seemed happy to be supported on his current American tour by the fantastically pro-Pally ‘white rapper’ Macklemore) is being reviled by the practitioners of what I call ‘Fresh’n’funky anti-Semitism’. Not the old right-wing kind which tried to keep Jews out of golf clubs for allegedly being vulgar, but the new left-wing kind which tries to keep them out of cultural discourse for allegedly being baby-killers. Isn’t progress wonderful!
The Sheeren kerfuffle has become a full-blown battle in the culture war, with new showbiz kids adding to the fray every day. Sheeran sacked Macklemore when the pro-Israel stadium-owner Robert Kraft threatened to pull the plug if he didn’t. Reacting to this, Sheeran’s backing band and all of his remaining support acts flounced off. (As Sarah Ettedgui posted amusingly on X: ‘A devastating blow to Ed Sheeran, who has now lost several opening acts most people had to Google.’)
Now the sublimely silly Paloma Faith (who has revealed that she says ‘Free Palestine’ to her kiddies every night before bed) has given her support to Macklemore on Channel 4. While the veteran Israel-baiter Roger Waters has added his invaluable contribution by calling Sheeran a ‘little prick.’ Enter Pink – responsible for more good pop songs than Sheeran, Macklemore, Faith and Waters put together – with an extremely articulate Instagram essay posted on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, containing the ineffably sad words ‘And now I’m standing up for my own people, and I thought I knew going in how lonely that would be. And it’s lonelier than that. But I’m doing it anyway.’
This week, Kraft claimed that Sheeran had asked him to donate $2 million to ‘aid in the region’ to match his own. Macklemore had already boasted that he planned to donate $1 million (cheapskate!) to ‘humanitarian’ organisations supporting Palestine. It’s all getting very macho; what it needs to diffuse it is Paloma Faith to step in and calm things down by offering to donate her breast milk (she’s done it before) to the humanitarian effort.
I really do loathe Sheeran, so it’s good (despite my German word) to be able to trace the origins of this brouhaha back to the fact that when he hired Macklemore, he very probably knew that he had once appeared on stage in what can only be described as ‘Jewface’ – a black wig and beard and a huge hooked false nose. I’m a free-speech absolutist – but I also believe in treating people equally, if we are not to live in a society mired by hypocrisy and deceit. If you ban balaclavas, ban burquas – or ban neither. If you find blackface repulsive, find Jewface and womanface repulsive – or be amused by them all. Once again, we find the left declaring that the thing it does is right because that it is the thing it does.
The gloomiest aspect of this whole business is wondering whether it is despite or because Macklemore dressed up like a Der Sturmer caricature of a Jew that he is now being treated as a hero in certain circles. A few years ago an alarming poll on anti-Semitic attitudes – measured by asking 11 questions about Jewish stereotypes and seeing if people agreed with them – found the disease most prevalent in the 18-34 age group and least from the over-50s. We know that Jewish children are being bullied in mixed schools in a way no other group are; we know that travelling to their own schools they are told to hide insignia which might mark them out. We tend to be soppy about the youth. How does this square with their increasing likelihood to be Jew-haters, taking up the slogans calling for Israel’s destruction as if it was a vicious new dance craze?
When it’s all over – and those responsible are denying everything they did to encourage it – we will look back on this time as we did the 1930s. How could the Germans have whipped up such hatred against such a small, benign ethnic minority, we used to wonder in more innocent times.
Once more I can only quote Aldous Huxley in Crome Yellow: ‘The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour “righteous indignation” – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.’
How did we reach this strange, hysterical place? It’s just part and parcel of the rising tide of the revival of unashamed – and grotesquely, even fashionable – Western anti-Semitism. That it has spread to the thoroughly frivolous arena of pop music shows how unstoppable it is.
