Robert Kraft, the US stadium owner who had pro-Palestinian rapper Macklemore removed as Ed Sheeran’s opening act at his venue, says Sheeran has asked him to donate $2m (\u00a31.5m) to “aid in the region”.<\/p>\n
The request came after Macklemore said he would donate $1m (\u00a3750,000) to Palestinian organisations, challenging Kraft to match the sum.<\/p>\n
Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, announced the requested pledge in his second statement this week on the controversy, without specifying where exactly the funds would go.<\/p>\n
On Monday, he confirmed he had Macklemore dropped as the opening act from Sheeran’s forthcoming performance at the Gillette Stadium near Boston, accusing the rapper of hate speech.<\/p>\n
Facing a backlash, Sheeran has said the decision to drop Macklemore from his Loop Tour was made by promoters and that he would not be drawn into a public debate over Gaza.<\/p>\n
In a statement, Kraft, 85, said: “Earlier today, before Macklemore challenged me to match his donation, Ed called me and asked me to commit $2 million to match his donation to aid in the region to fight this humanitarian crisis.<\/p>\n
“Ed now plans to reach out to other venue owners and our goal is to continue to work together to build bridges.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robert Kraft, the US stadium owner who had pro-Palestinian rapper Macklemore removed as Ed Sheeran’s opening act at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":773250,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-773249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/773250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}