Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: What could Ed Sheeran have done here?

Well, what do you do if you're Ed Sheeran today? 

His tour is in turmoil. All four support acts have pulled out in solidarity with Macklemore over the Palestine support stuff. He's been slammed in newspaper columns for not standing up for Macklemore, and now his mural in Dunedin has been defaced.

So, what do you do? You know what you do? You carry on. You play the gigs anyway - because probably Ed Sheeran doesn't need support acts, just like Lady Gaga doesn't need support acts.

He will fill the stadium anyway because there is a good proportion of his audience, if not the majority of his audience, who are mums and their kids out to listen to some pop hits sung by Ed Sheeran himself who actually don't care about politics.

And that actually is his intention. At least at the moment, things are moving pretty fast, but right now he intends to continue his tour.

Now, I'm not particularly a fan of Ed Sheeran's, but I feel sorry for him in this. He has become the whipping boy in a spat between two other people.

On one side, you've got Robert Kraft, the Jewish owner of the Gillette Stadium, that has banned Macklemore from performing on account of the fact that Macklemore's been speaking out against Israel over Gaza, and 12 years ago he wore a mask on stage that very clearly made fun of Hasidic Jews, even if he said he didn't realise it at the time.

On the other side is Ed's support act, Macklemore, who wants to - and should be able to - speak out in support of Gaza. But "should be able to" also comes with the consequences of doing that.

And that is that Macklemore cannot be surprised that people with power who support the state of Israel will not like what he is saying and that, especially in these days of concerns about the safety of Jewish people in crowds in Western countries, he was eventually probably going to run into some opposition.

Now, I'm not going to tell you whose side you should be on because, frankly, you're probably going to choose based on how you feel about the Gaza situation, aren't you? This is not a debate where people change their minds very easily.

And so, I think blaming Ed Sheeran for staying out of the public debate, which is one that people don't change their minds on very easily, is unfair when there are a lot of people who are also choosing to stay out of this public debate.

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