I have spent too much time this morning looking for the clips of the actual speech and the actual performance. Agree that there is nothing in here that is surprising or horrifying. BUT... as a person who has been directly affected by the hate marches and the hate rhetoric and the endless, endless focus on one war while there are so many others getting ignored I can absolutely understand why people were scared.
It's just... the people there chose to be there. That's the disconnect for me - of course I have nothing but empathy for my friend's kids who were upset (and yes, there are teenagers who go to concerts with their parents! That's not that strange). It's truly frightening to be surrounded by people shouting 'fuck Israel' and 'death to the IDF' and all that stuff. I don't even see it anymore after years of it. But I am super cautious about going into the world without preparation. I check on the protests before going into town with my kids. I avoid a specific area of town altogether. I never ever wear my Jewish star after several problematic situations.
My daughter was traumatised at school several times. When she was 9, she was blocked leaving the bus after a school trip by 3 children her age telling her she can't get off the bus until she 'votes' as she needs to tell everyone what side she's on. When she was 10 she was followed around at break time by a rotating group of kids of a particular religion and told 'my family wants your family dead' and when she was 11, she was surrounded by a group of 13/14 year old boys yelling 'Free Palestine' and trying to follow her home so 'they can see where the rest of you live so we can tell our fathers'. That one involved the police in the end and is the reason she never ever goes to school without her phone on her. (On the positive side, when she was 13 she was blocked in the library by some older boys asking her if she was 'as weak as Anne Frank'. As we signed her up for self-defence classes after the chasing incident she very much is not and was able to push her way past several of them so she won that round.) But for her (and her little brother who was scared to go to school for months), the Palestinian flag and the chants of Free Palestine are legitimately frightening.
This in no way suggests that her life as a middle class child in a lovely city is anywhere as horrifying as living in a war zone in Palestine or Israel or Ukraine. Of course it's not. But her life is scarier than it was 3 years ago and none of that has anything to do with her. She's never even been to Israel, has no opinions on it, and certainly doesn't want any of her classmates to die. She's just a Scottish child navigating the world as the only Jewish child in her school and it's been awful.
But back to the point... I would in no way want to be there but I would have done my research and known that ahead of time. So it's hard for me to have complete sympathy for my friends who seem bewilderingly surprised by the whole mess. I have no idea who Ed Sheeran thought he was booking and I really have no idea why no one in the many, many people who would have seen the pre-checks and had the capacity to read Macklemore's lyrics online just as I do would think it's worth this sort of drama afterwards. Of course he's entitled to his opinion and of course he should use the stage he was freely offered to share them. Am genuinely confused by this whole palaver.