I have just heard a podcast from BBC’s The Moral Maze which I regularly listen to called “Can we separate pop from politics?”,. This episode was probably as a result of the stick that Airhead Ed got for dropping Macklemore, a support act on Ed’s US tour, who said Free Palestine. In this episode, the two people I am going to take to task are Ella Whelan, a political and free-speech advocate who is pro-woman but anti-feminist, confusing, I know, and Giles Fraser, priest, so he says and polemicist. The programme started by quoting Bob Geldof in support of Ed, saying “silence is not political,” and “fame is currency, and it depends on how you want to use it.” Just to add, Ed has £370 million to spend, but like me, only has one life. To the poor Ed brigade, Ella and Giles you not remember Free Nelson Mandela, A Change Is Gonna Come, Mississippi Goddam, Strange Fruit, The March of the Women, and A Town Called Malice.
Let me start by quoting MLK Jnr on the issue of silence: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Howard Zinn, an American historian quoted in the programme, said, “You cannot be neutral on a moving train; even silence is a decision of what to sing, what to write, what to paint and what to leave out, and silence is never heard the same way by everyone; to some it may sound like creative focus, to others complicity”.
The first guest was Tom Phelan, a music journalist who was clearly appalled by the genocide in Gaza and disagreed with Ed’s so-called neutral stance on the genocide and believed neutrality was a myth and a cop out. Ella Whelan, the first panellist, dressed bullshit as some sort of political/philosophical insight and started this by saying that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. What that statement had to do with the issue was beyond baffling. It seems she would draw no moral distinction between Mein Kampf, The Camp of the Saints, or The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry, The Passing of the Great Race, and Beloved by Toni Morrison, Animal Farm, 1984, and To Kill a Mockingbird.
She said, would you support Ed if he was pro-Israel. This in itself was a stupid question because you can support Israel as a state and condemn the genocide being perpetrated by the current Israeli regime. She needs to have a chat with Peter Beinhart and Omer Bartov, Jews who have called out Israeli actions in Gaza as genocide. In addition, read the Our Genocide report from the Israel-based Jewish human rights organisation B’Tselem.She then went to the virtue-signalling BS, as some left-wing disease; he pushed back, saying this was not a lefty disease, just people who had no substance behind their views.
Well, Giles took the biscuit in his first comment; he said, “I care as much about what people have to say about Gaza as Jedward have to say on interest rates”. This so-called priest conflates the killing of 20,000 children with the bond markets. He went on to imply that poor wee Ed was being bullied, and he had a right to keep his own counsel. He went on to imply that Ed was not the sharpest knife in the drawer and was simply good at playing the guitar, and if someone came up to him (Ed) and asked him about a complicated political question, could he (Ed) think or respond, “I don’t know”? First, you have to ask what planet Ed was living on and whether being a pop star is an abdication of a moral position. However, when the guest pointed out that what was going on in Gaza was genocide, the priest said, “I don’t think it’s a genocide. Well, Giles, ask the people I have mentioned above, and maybe ask the families and friends of the 20,000 children carpet-bombed and killed by the IDF and the 15,000 who need prosthetic limbs. In Giles, we have a rare beast: a priest without compassion, humanity, and political awareness.
A bit of advice for him: have a chat with Nick Hayward, a consultant in the NHS who has been working with Medical Aid for Palestine in Gaza at the Nasser Hospital; his humanity is unfathomable, as he has put his life on the line serving others. Giles seems to have bought into the Netanyahu strategy and has conflated the holocaust and genocide. Genocide, which has been perpetrated for centuries, and international law has defined genocide under Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention as “specific acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”. What part of that definition do you find hard to swallow?
Finally, let’s refer to your mate Jesus, who said: “Who is my neighbour?” Here, Jesus told the story of the Samaritan who crossed social and ethnic lines to care for a beaten stranger, commanding listeners to “go and do likewise”, and this is from an atheist.
Suneil Sharma
12th October 2026
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