I never thought I’d see the day that I’d be defending Ed Sheeran. Not that I have anything particular against him: I don’t know a single song of his, but he seems inoffensive enough and, frankly, what I’d rather my teenage daughter listen to than Nicky Minaj. Other than that, he’s so far been a vaguely annoying blip on my cultural radar. At least one thing I’d have said in his favour is that, unlike just about every other celebrity on the face of the planet, he hasn’t felt the compulsion to grace us with the benefit of his (invariably bog-standard lefty) received opinions.
But we live in an era of cultural Stalinism, where loyalty oaths and Two Minutes of Hates are the left’s pole stars. Hence, when Sheeran refused to kneel at the foot of the Jew-hating crowd, the fire and fury of the left-establishment came for him, pitchforks and torches in hand.
Until very recently, Mr Sheeran’s views on the Levant were entirely unknown. The ginger minstrel merely wished to strum his guitar and entertain the masses. That idyllic ignorance vanished when a support act known as Macklemore decided to inflict his crude political prejudices upon the audience, bellowing stale activist mantras. Lest anyone try to deny Macklemore’s motive is anything other than antisemitism, ponder this stage appearance:
Naturally, the promoters had the good sense to eject this pestilence from the tour. Yet this singular act of professional hygiene brought the baying mob down upon poor Sheeran’s head. The Free Palestine zealots operate on a totalitarian binary: either you integrate their obsessive grievance into every waking thought or you are marked as an active participant in slaughter. Neutrality is heresy: silence is treason.
Poor Sheeran tried valiantly to steer clear of the mire. But modern inquisitors demand public obeisance. Confronted by the relentless screeching of the chattering classes, he offered a prepared statement at his Philadelphia engagement. For a man unaccustomed to political posturing, the address was remarkably measured, striving to walk the tightrope between humanitarian empathy and common sense.
He noted his reluctance to become a billboard for radical causes, expressing a preference for musical harmony over sectarian division. Yet, in addressing the substance of the tragedy, he grounded the horror in historical reality:
This is a humanitarian issue, and I cannot hide how I feel about it any more. What happened in Israel and at the Nova music festival on October 7 was horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain. What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate. My heart has been broken by the scale of devastation and loss of civilians’ lives, children’s lives.
One may quibble with his deployment of the word disproportionate: a favourite lexical crutch of those who believe a sovereign nation ought to respond to butchery with a sternly worded letter, or that war is a sport where each side must end up with an equal body count. But credit where credit is due: unlike his peers, who swallow Hamas propaganda whole for the applause of north London dinner parties, Sheeran insisted on placing suffering in Gaza squarely alongside the pogroms of October 7. He refused to detach the current campaign from the sadistic slaughter that initiated it.
Naturally, this nuanced stance ran straight into the institutional wall of national broadcasters. The BBC, ever vigilant in distorting reality in service of progressive orthodoxy, took a carving knife to his remarks. On Broadcasting House, news editors performed a classic piece of Soviet-style redaction, playing the half of Sheeran’s quote that bewailed Gaza while airbrushing out any mention whatsoever of October 7.
It omitted mention of his condemnation of what happened on October 7, with its correspondent telling listeners only that he “clarified where he stood on the situation in Gaza”, followed by a recording of Sheeran saying: “What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic, unjustifiable, and disproportionate. My heart has been broken by the scale of devastation and loss of civilian lives.” And that was it. In the extract of the recording that you can listen to below, there is no mention of October 7 at all.
Had the corporation played the inverse trick, broadcasting the condemnation of Hamas while ignoring Gaza, we would have witnessed immediate parliamentary inquiries, ritual sackings and the rending of garments across the liberal press. Yet for the BBC, this brazen falsification of context is standard operating procedure for an institution that shapes national consciousness along strictly approved ideological lines.
This totalising mindset brooks no exceptions. Consider actress Gillian Anderson, who recorded an appeal for the cataclysmic humanitarian disaster in Sudan, a crisis playing out without the requisite villains to excite the progressive conscience. Because she failed to append a mandatory coda about Gaza, she was pilloried by the mob as a Zionist stooge.
This is the tyranny of Palestinianism: an ideological black hole demanding cultural figures prostrate themselves before its altar. When artists attempt nuance, esteemed public broadcasters are right there with scissors in hand, ensuring the narrative remains pristine, partisan and thoroughly divorced from truth.
