As American rapper Macklemore becomes a frontline for renewed mainstream discourse about Israeli atrocities in Gaza, Israel apologists have been falling all over themselves to circulate the demonstrably false narrative that the artist has a history of antisemitic behavior.
Zionist billionaire Robert Kraft defended his intervention to remove Macklemore from the Ed Sheeran tour for saying “Free Palestine” onstage, falsely claiming in a statement that the artist has a “history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community.”
The Anti-Defamation League falsely 𝕏claimed that Macklemore’s onstage pro-Palestine rhetoric is colored by the artist’s “record of demonizing Israel and Israelis, falsely accusing Israel of genocide and engaging in antisemitic rhetoric and behavior.”
“For years, Macklemore has pushed antisemitic tropes,” 𝕏claimed ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt on news of the artist’s removal from the tour.
As is generally the case with people who defend the actions of the state of Israel, these claims are lies designed to advance the interests of a genocidal apartheid state.
I don’t generally enjoy talking about celebrities or picking apart the minutiae of their public controversies, but since this one has landed in my area of interest and is being frantically promoted by hasbarists on every corner of the internet, I’m going to take some time to debunk these claims point by point.
When Israel apologists claim that Benjamin Hammond Haggerty AKA Macklemore has a “history of antisemitism,” they are referring to one incident and one incident only. In 2014 Haggerty drew controversy for wearing a large fake nose in a performance which was subsequently decried as antisemitic, which would have been a fair claim if the artist had intended to depict a Jewish person.
The problem is that there is absolutely zero evidence this was the case. In a lengthy statement apologizing profusely to anyone he’d offended, Haggerty said he’d grabbed a bunch of costume supplies in order to disguise himself for a show where he could walk among the crowd and surprise them with a short performance.
Here’s an excerpt:
“On Friday night we had a surprise show at the EMP Museum in Seattle. Earlier in the day I thought it would be fun to dress up in a disguise and go incognito to the event, so that I could walk around unnoticed and surprise the crowd with a short performance. I picked up a bunch of fake mustaches and beards and grabbed a left over wig from our recent trip to Japan.
“As it turns out the fake noses they sell at the costume store are usually big (my nose didn’t fit most of them). So I ended up with a big witch nose. I went with a black beard, because that’s the furthest color from my natural hair. Disguise was the intention. I personally thought I looked very ambiguous in terms of any ‘type’ of person. Some people there thought I looked like Ringo, some Abe Lincoln. If anything I thought I looked like Humpty Hump with a bowl cut.”
A witch nose. It was a witch nose from a costume store. For Halloween.
There is no evidence whatsoever that Haggerty was lying about any of this. If there had been other incidents of the artist expressing hateful opinions about Jews, one could make the case that he may have been lying about his intentions with the fake nose incident. But there are no such incidents. There was the witch nose thing in 2014, and then saying “Free Palestine” twelve years later. I’ve been arguing about this with hasbarists online for two days, and not one of them has been able to cite a single example of hateful behavior toward Jews apart from him wearing a fake nose many years ago.
I’ve seen some people try to argue antisemitic intentions by citing the fact that Macklemore wore the outfit to perform his song “Thrift Shop”, playing into tropes about Jews pinching pennies, but anyone who makes that argument simply hasn’t listened to the lyrics of the song or ▶watched the music video. It’s very clearly and unambiguously a song about shopping at a thrift store because you’re poor, not because you’re cheap; the line “only got 20 dollars in my pocket” is right there in the chorus. Unless being poor is an “antisemitic trope” now, that argument is out the window.
I’ve seen some people 𝕏point to a still image from the incident in which Macklemore appears to be doing a “sieg heil” gesture, but that’s out the window too because (A) if Macklemore had done an actual deliberate-looking Nazi salute we would have seen video footage of it, and (B) we learned from right wing efforts to defend Elon Musk’s 𝕏actual full-fledged Roman salute at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration rally that it is very easy to grab a still frame of a moving person with their arm in that position; I remember seeing 𝕏Libs of TikTok share images of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris with their arms in the “Heil Hitler” position to argue that Musk’s blatant Nazi gesture was being mischaracterized. It seems clear that Macklemore was just dancing to the song and amping the crowd and had his arm up at some point in his movements.
And that is it. That’s the extent of the argument that Macklemore has a “history of antisemitism”. It’s a classic Gish gallop fallacy, where a bunch of individually weak arguments are clumped together to create the illusion of a strong argument.
In the same 𝕏pro-Palestine speech which gave rise to all this artificial controversy, Macklemore said the following:
“To all of my Jewish brothers and sisters: criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you. My message is for peace; love for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality.”
There is not one shred of evidence, anywhere, that these words were insincere.
A lot of the furor over the 2014 incident seems to arise from Jewish people not understanding that the average non-Jew simply doesn’t know very much about antisemitic tropes, and spends very little time in their day-to-day life thinking about Jewishness or antisemitism. If you showed the average gentile on the street a “happy merchant” meme, they’d have no idea what the hell they were looking at. As an Australian who was raised Catholic I knew next to nothing about antisemitic tropes until I started regularly engaging in online political commentary for a living, and neither did my Catholic husband from the United States. It’s simply not something non-Jews typically talk about or teach their kids to recognize.
I remember years ago tweeting something about Benjamin Netanyahu being “bloodthirsty” or something to that effect, and a follower DMed me politely suggesting I delete it because there’s a long antisemitic history of associating Jews with drinking blood. I remember being surprised; I’d sincerely had no idea, I was just making a comment about a warmonger’s constant warmongering. I deleted the tweet and avoided the term going forward. So speaking for myself I can very easily see a cradle Catholic like Haggerty putting on a fake nose in 2014 and never having it cross his mind that it might be interpreted by anyone as a hateful trope about Jews.
But even saying this gives way too much credence to the idea that the people decrying Macklemore as some kind of Nazi are acting in good faith. These are the same people after all who tried to spin the narrative that Greta Thunberg hates Jews because she posed for a pro-Palestine photo near an octopus plushie, claiming the octopus was historically sometimes used in antisemitic tropes.
People who defend Israel’s actions in Gaza consistently act in bad faith. Of course they do. They support genocide. They’re bad people. Of course someone who can keep supporting a live-streamed holocaust will also lie, manipulate, and pretend to believe things they don’t really believe in order to advance the information interests of an apartheid state. Truth and morality are not important values for them.
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Feature image by San Francisco Foghorn — Macklemore, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24696560
