Washington Examiner columnist Joe Concha said Ed Sheeran should have stayed away from politics at his concert after receiving backlash for dropping Macklemore from his tour after the rapper made pro-Palestinian comments onstage.
“Ed Sheeran should’ve just let this go and just gone to Philadelphia and performed the songs that people wanted to hear,” Concha said Sunday on Fox News Live.
During Sheeran’s Philadelphia performance, his first time taking the stage since Macklemore’s removal from the tour, the singer said he never wanted to be an “activist musician” and that his shows were about unity, not division.
“But this has put me in the middle of an important and passionate argument about freedom of speech and the most complex political issue on the planet,” Sheeran said.
Sheeran spoke about the devastation of both the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks and the response by Israel. While acknowledging that they were “horrific,” Sheeran said what has happened since then in Gaza is “unjustifiable and disproportionate.”
“But I went back and looked, and during the concert Ed Sheeran performed right after Oct. 7, 2023, and the attacks by Hamas that obviously left 1,200 dead in Israel, the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust, Sheeran did not, at that time, utter one peep about all those who were murdered, raped, or kidnapped on that horrible day,” Concha said.
The British musician is known not to take political stances, removing himself from the internet in general. Pop singer Taylor Swift famously joked about how she forgot to tell Sheeran about her engagement on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, explaining that to connect with him, she needed to contact his assistant to give Sheeran an iPad.
ED SHEERAN ADDRESSES MACKLEMORE CONTROVERSY IN PRE-CONCERT SPEECH
Concha said concertgoers do not want to spend more than $100 for nosebleed seats only to hear an “Ivy League campus protest.” Concha said the singer earned around $100 million in revenue in the first 17 dates, taunting Sheeran to put words into action.
“Surely he can afford to go to Gaza and do something with his own hands to help people, instead of writing them a check and complaining from afar,” Concha said. “But in the end, people just want to hear music.”