Excitement about rapper Ghali before the opening of the Olympics: The Middle East conflict reaches Milan

Those responsible for the Olympics have once again spared no expense or effort if you look at the top acts alone: ​​Mariah Carey is performing this Friday evening, as is the Chinese pianist Lang Lang, who is a superstar in his profession.

Also there are the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, who Donald Trump thinks highly of and who has already given a private concert for Trump in the White House, the Italian Latin pop singer Laura Pausini, the actor Pierfrancesco Favino, the “The White Lotus” actress Sabrina Impacciatore, the opera singer Cecilia Bartoli and the Italian rapper Ghali.

Ghali’s planned appearance is now generating excitement in Italy and ahead of the opening ceremony, which begins at 8 p.m. The 32-year-old, whose last name is Amdouni and whose parents come from Tunisia, has been targeted by the right-wing and thus by Giorgia Meloni’s ruling Lega party.

The reason: Ghali, who musically plays a mixture of rap, pop and electronic music and sings in Italian and Arabic, is a sharp critic of Israel. In 2024, during an appearance at the Sanremo festival, he expressed his solidarity with the Palestinians and called on Israel to stop the “genocide” in Gaza.

This caused debate in Italy even back then. Now Lega circles say: “It is really unbelievable to have an Israel hater and enemy of the center-right camp at the opening ceremony.” And: “Italy and the games deserve an artist, not a pro-Palestinian fanatic.”

The piece “Casa Mia,” with which Ghali performed in Sanremo, can also be understood as a description of the situation in Gaza: “But how can you say that everything is normal here,” sings Ghali in the piece. “To draw a border with imaginary lines, you bomb a hospital/For a piece of land or a piece of bread/There is never peace.”

Sports and Youth Minister Andrea Abodi now explained that Amdouni “will not express his opinion on stage”; he represents an opinion “that we do not share”. However, how Ghali will behave is questionable because he has already complained on his Instagram account about not being allowed to sing the Italian national anthem.

It is intoned by Laura Pausini, whoever made this decision. “I know why I was no longer allowed to sing the Italian national anthem. (…) I also know that my silence makes noise. I know that everything is a big theater,” said Ghali on Instagram.

Big theater is a nice keyword, that’s how the International Olympic Committee imagines it. With its ever closer alliance with pop culture, it wants to make the games even bigger than they already are, and only in the show part, which should be colorful and apolitical.

But the fact that pop is also highly politicized, especially since the Hamas attack on Israel, that a second-generation Italian rapper has a different attitude to the Middle East conflict than Italy’s government or Trump friend Bocelli does not seem to have occurred to the IOC.

“Armonia” is the motto of the opening ceremony, harmony, and it couldn’t be more naive and unworldly.