On Macklemore and the sadness of empty virtue signaling

Macklemore "not meaning to offend".

Ah, Macklemore, Macklemore, Macklemore. 

Unless you've been living under a rock, the latest outrage du jour was Mr. Macklemore being refused entry to certain arenas as the opening act for equally talentless Ed Sheeran because he felt it incumbent to shout "Free Palestine" and harangue captive audiences with his intricate and nuanced opinions on the Israeli-Arab conflict.

The furore was immediate. First Sheeran's house band dropped out of the tour in "solidarity". Then, one by one, all of Sheeran's other opening acts dropped out. And Sheeran felt the need to abase himself before the great and righteous horde, declaring that just because he was silent didn't mean he was "complicit". Complicit in what? Well, complicit in hating Israel and Jews more broadly. "I hate them, I hate them, I really hate them!"

Let us consider the music economy.

No artist makes much money from recorded music any longer. The domination of Spotify sees to that. So musicians must tour, tour, tour to make the livings which afford them the lifestyles to which they are accustomed. Giving up a lucrative tour like Ed Sheeran's—although why anyone listens to his mediocrity is a mystery to me—is no small matter. "They're putting their livelihoods at stake!!"

Bizzatch, please.

If there is any more lucrative route to highly remunerative employment in today's entertainment industry, it is to screech out "Free Palestine", get canceled by "evil Zionist interests", and then picked up by other artists who will gladly take you on with no questions asked, I would be flummoxed. The likes of Mark Ruffalo proudly wear their antisemitism anti-Zionism and are welcomed by most of the great and the good in the Industry. Yes, being a loud and proud truth-teller against filthy Jewish perfidy is the path to riches. But it has always been thus.

The pro-Hamasniks are painting Macklemore as a martyr to poor, oppressed Palestinians. He's nothing of the kind. This entire episode will redound to his favor, as it will to all the bands on the tour. They'll get invited to next summer's Glastonbury, site of many equally-principled denunciations of Israeli evil. Hell, he might even be able to headline his own tour, and it might even play outside of Indian casinos. Which is an wonderful personal outcome for a white rapper who is much closer to Fred Durst than to Adam Yauch in the panoply of Caucasian hip hop.

What all these people are doing, from Macklemore to Bob Vylan to countless more, is engaging in cheap, easy virtue signaling. It is easy to get on stage and excoriate Israeli "crimes" against "the defenseless", without actually delving too deeply into the complexities and the nuances. The main complexity being that this war was not begun by Israel. Israel and Hamas had a truce in place. Hamas, for its own reasons, broke that truce in the most violent and spectacular way. And in the process slaughtered over one thousand Israelis—not all of them Jews—and kidnapped more than two hundred of them, half of whom either died or were executed by the terrorists. 

Someone who truly cared about Gazans, as I think we all do who are reading this, would accept that the prerequisite to peace between Israel and Palestine is to not valorize death cults who see it as their mission to destroy Israel and slaughter all of its 9 million Jews. Because that, my friends, is the Hamas charter. You can look it up yourself on that phone you have in your pocket which contains the sum total of human knowledge. But instead these people get their "history" from malign foreign actors on their favorite social media apps, feeding them propaganda which makes Julius Streicher smile as he's being tortured in Hell.

True virtue is difficult. It involves moral clarity over moral certainty. It involves accepting that all sides in a conflict do things which are not optimal. True virtue requires an idea of morality which is not couched in absolutes. Virtue signaling erases all that. "This is what's right and you are not only wrong but morally deficient." When you take that stance, it is you who is morally deficient.

Look at the picture at the head of this piece. His defenders are making excuses. "It was twelve years ago! He apologized!" I have spent fifty-seven years on this earth. I have never dressed in blackface or Jewface. It's not hard to be decent. It's intentional to not be. Would his supporters have forgiven him had he worn shoe polish and an Afro wig? Of course not. But as the great tzaddik David Baddiel titled his book, "Jews don't count". Jews are always the ready scapegoat when things become frightening, and you don't know what is your place in the world. "The eternal Jew" is such because he and she are always the handy explanation for why you don't have a job and your wife left you. It is disgusting, and Macklemore and his acolytes are nothing new in this long and sad history. What we can do is to support the community threatened once again. Never again means never again for me. I hope it does for you.