Patriots owner Kraft confirms taking Macklemore off Ed Sheeran’s Gillette shows over antisemitism

New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium owner Bob Kraft has acknowledged banning rapper Macklemore from playing two shows at the venue with singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, over what he calls continued “antisemitic rhetoric.”Early reporting Monday that the Seattle rapper would no longer be an opening act on Sheeran’s U.S. stadium tour cited Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusetts, among the venues that intended to ban him from the remainder of the tour and suggests the effort was led by Kraft.
In a statement later Monday, Kraft detailed his reasons for banning Macklemore from the Sept. 25-26 shows at Gillette. But he did not respond to the rapper’s assertion that Sheeran told him last week that Kraft had “rallied some of the other stadium owners” into a collective ban for the remainder of the U.S. tour. 
“Gillette Stadium has a longstanding commitment to providing a welcoming environment for all guests and ensuring that events held at our venue do not provide a platform for hate speech,” Kraft said in a lengthy statement. 
“Based on Macklemore’s recent actions, material shared from the stage during Ed Sheeran’s shows in New Jersey, and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community, we determined that his participation in the … concerts at Gillette Stadium would cross that line. …”
Macklemore, in a social media post, said Sheeran told him that his “Free Palestine” statement and the image of the Palestinian flag at the Sept. 4 concert in New Jersey were “hurtful to a lot of people he spoke with.”

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