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Rapper Macklemore compares Minneapolis to Gaza

The Anti-Defamation League has said in the past, “How many false claims and antisemitic tropes can Macklemore fit into one song?”

Macklemore
The rapper Macklemore (Ben Haggerty) performs in Toronto, Canada, during “The Heist Tour” on Nov. 28, 2012. Credit: Flickr/Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons.

The 42-year-old rapper Macklemore stated on Tuesday that “Gaza and Minneapolis are not separate stories.”

“They operate through the same machinery that treats people as disposable and calls it order,” he wrote. “Different places, the same architecture of harm. Property protected, always stolen. Profit prioritized. Violence justified.”

Macklemore, whose real name is Ben Haggerty and whose hits include “Thrift Shop,” “Can’t Hold Us” and “Glorious,” has more than 20 million followers across various social media platforms.

The Anti-Defamation League has said that the rapper “villainizes Israel” and “tokenizes Jews who pass his anti-Zionist litmus test.”

“How many false claims and antisemitic tropes can Macklemore fit into one song?” it said.

“I’m scared of what’s going to happen now,” Miri Bar-Halpern, a Jewish psychology lecturer at Harvard Medical School, told JNS. “I can already predict the backlash.”
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