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Las Vegas Festival Drops Macklemore, Seattle Sports Teams Evaluate Ties to Rapper After He Says ‘F–k America’
Macklemore performs at Alcatraz Milan on May 3, 2023 in Milan, Italy. Photo: Roberto Finizio via Reuters Connect
Organizers of an inaugural music, art, and culinary festival that will take place in downtown Las Vegas in November said on Tuesday that Grammy-winning rapper Macklemore will no longer be one of the event’s headliners “due to unforeseen circumstances.”
Organizers of the Neon City Festival made the announcement in an Instagram post after Macklemore, whose real name is Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, shouted “F—k America!” during his performance at the Palestine Will Love Forever Festival in Seattle on Sunday. His comment garnered massive applause from the audience, and the Seattle-based rapper also told the crowd gathered in Seward Park Amphitheater that Israel has been committing “a genocide since 1948,” a reference to the year the state of Israel was established.
All proceeds from the pro-Palestinian event will be given to various groups, including the controversial United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which faced allegations that several of its employees participated in the Oct. 7 deadly Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel.
The Neon City Festival will run free for all ages from Nov. 22-24. Macklemore was one of the festival’s headlining acts when they were first announced by organizers on Friday. They include the rock band Neon Trees, Australian DJ Alison Wonderland, DJ Seven Lions, and country artist Russell Dickerson. The festival’s full lineup will be announced this week.
Organizers of the festival made the announcement about the cancellation of Macklemore’s performance a day after two Seattle-based sports teams issued a joint statement distancing themselves from the rapper. Macklemore is a part owner of the NHL’s Seattle Kraken and MLS’s Seattle Sounders FC. Both teams released a joint statement on Monday about Macklemore’s comments over the weekend.
“We believe that sports bring people together and unite us. We are aware of Macklemore’s increasingly divisive comments, and they do not reflect the values of our respective ownership groups, leagues, or organizations. We are currently evaluating our collective options on this matter,” the teams said.
In May, Macklemore released a song called “Hind’s Hall,” which praises college students in the US for participating in anti-Israel protests on university campuses amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. In the song he also accuses Israel of genocide and occupation, and implies that the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks were an act of “resistance.” The track’s title is a reference to Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, the building that anti-Israel student protesters broke into and occupied in April and renamed “Hind’s Hall” in honor of Hind Rajab — a child killed in Gaza during the ongoing war. All proceeds from the song went to UNRWA.
Macklemore released on Friday “Hind’s Hall 2” and the track features Palestinian-American artists Anees and Amer Zahr, Gaza-born rapper MC Abdul, and the Los Angeles Palestinian Kids Choir. The featured performers sing on the track “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a slogan that is widely interpreted as a call for the destruction of Israel, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and for it to replaced with “Palestine.”
In “Hind’s Hall 2,” Macklemore raps: “Long live the resistance if there’s something to resist/Had enough of you motherf—ers murdering little kids/PC for a minute I was trying to be a bridge/But there’ll never be freedom by pleading with Zionists/World screaming, ‘Free Palestine’/We seen the manual we know how you colonized.”
Macklemore also criticizes US support for Israel in the track. At one point he directs attention to US Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and raps: “Hey Kamala, I don’t know if you’re listening/But stop sending money and weapons or you ain’t winning … When will Congress decide a Palestinian’s life/Is just as precious as an Israeli’s.”
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Smotrich Says Defense Ministry to Spur Voluntary Emigration from Gaza
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends an inauguration event for Israel’s new light rail line for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, in Petah Tikva, Israel, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
i24 News – Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday that the government would establish an administration to encourage the voluntary migration of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
“We are establishing a migration administration, we are preparing for this under the leadership of the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] and Defense Minister [Israel Katz],” he said at a Land of Israel Caucus at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. “The budget will not be an obstacle.”
Referring to the plan championed by US President Donald Trump, Smotrich noted the “profound and deep hatred towards Israel” in Gaza, adding that “sources in the American government” agreed “that it’s impossible for two million people with hatred towards Israel to remain at a stone’s throw from the border.”
The administration would be under the Defense Ministry, with the goal of facilitating Trump’s plan to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” and the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Gazans for rebuilding efforts.
“If we remove 5,000 a day, it will take a year,” Smotrich said. “The logistics are complex because you need to know who is going to which country. It’s a potential for historical change.”
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Defense Ministry: 16,000 Wounded in War, About Half Under 30
A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – The Knesset’s (Israeli parliament’s) Special Committee for Foreign Workers held a discussion on Sunday to examine the needs of wounded and disabled IDF soldiers and the response foreign caregivers could provide.
During the discussion, data from the Defense Minister revealed that the number of registered IDF wounded and disabled veterans rose from 62,000 to 78,000 since the war began on October 7, 2023. “Most of them are reservists and 51 percent of the wounded are up to 30 years old,” the ministry’s report said. The number will increase, the ministry assesses, as post-trauma cases emerge.
The committee chairwoman, Knesset member Etty Atiya (Likud), emphasized the need to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy for the wounded and to remove obstacles. “There is no dispute that the IDF disabled have sacrificed their bodies and souls for the people of Israel, for the state of Israel,” she said. Addressing the veterans, she continued: “And we, as public representatives and public servants alike, must do everything, but everything, to improve your lives in any way possible, to alleviate your pain and the distress of your family members who are no less affected than you.”
Currently, extensions are being given to the IDF veterans on a three-month basis, which Atiya said creates uncertainty and fear among the patients.
“The committee calls on the Interior Minister [Moshe Arbel] to approve as soon as possible the temporary order on our table, so that it will reach the approval of the Knesset,” she said, adding that she “intends to personally approach the Director General of the Population Authority [Shlomo Mor-Yosef] on the matter in order to promote a quick and stable solution.”
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Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad speaks during an interview with Sky News Arabia in Damascus, Syria in this handout picture released by the Syrian Presidency on August 8, 2023. Syrian Presidency/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – Over 1,300 people were killed in two days of fighting in Syria between security forces under the new Syrian Islamist leaders and fighters from ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect on the other hand, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday.
Since Thursday, 1,311 people had been killed, according to the Observatory, including 830 civilians, mainly Alawites, 231 Syrian government security personnel, and 250 Assad loyalists.
The intense fighting broke out late last week as the Alawite militias launched an offensive against the new government’s fighters in the coastal region of the country, prompting a massive deployment ordered by new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.
“We must preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible and… we will be able to live together in this country,” al-Sharaa said, as quoted in the BBC.
The death toll represents the most severe escalations since Assad was ousted late last year, and is one of the most costly in terms of human lives since the civil war began in 2011.
The counter-offensive launched by al-Sharaa’s forces was marked by reported revenge killings and atrocities in the Latakia region, a stronghold of the Alawite minority in the country.
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