Turkish authorities said on Wednesday that they have banned a planned concert by French singer Enrico Macias in İstanbul after calls to protest the artist’s pro-Israel views.
The İstanbul Governor’s Office said in a statement that it had acted to prevent demonstrations on the sidelines of the concert, which was scheduled for Friday, “against the genocide by the terrorist state Israel and its supporters in Gaza.”
Macias, 86, told Agence France-Presse that he has performed in Turkey for 60 years and was “deeply surprised and saddened not to be able to see my audience, with whom I have always shared values of peace and fraternity.”
The singer, who was born into a Jewish family in Algeria, has repeatedly defended Israel’s military actions in response to Hamas’s October 2023 attacks.
“My problem is that I can’t stand the violence of the terrorists,” he said in an interview on YouTube in August. “And if there was violence on the Israeli side, it was because of Hamas,” he added, while stressing that he had “nothing against the Palestinians.”
© Agence France-Presse
