Ticketmaster under fire for selling tickets to Louis Farrakhan event

Popular California-based ticket sales and distribution company Ticketmaster has come under fire from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) this week after they hosted ticket sales for antisemite Louis Farrakhan's Saviours' Day conference which was held in Chicago on Feb. 24-26.

Described as an "extremist figure" by the ADL, Farrakhan is the head of the National of Islam. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the National of Islam is "based on a somewhat bizarre and fundamentally anti-white theology."

The SPLC also characterized Farrakhan as "an antisemite who routinely accuses Jews of manipulating the US government and controlling the levers of world power." The ADL drew a similar conclusion about Farrakhan on its website. 

Saviours' Day is the Nation of Islam's annual holiday commemorating the birth of its founder, W. Fard Muhammad. According to the ADL, the annual conference which coincides with Saviours' Day draws thousands of people and "features antisemitic, bigoted commentary from Louis Farrakhan and other speakers." 

Louis Farrakhan's most recent antisemitic comments

At this year's conference, Farrakhan made such comments as: 

• “A Jewish man said to me, ‘You know, we say never again. Never again will we be in the oven. Never again.’ I said, ‘Hold it.’ You can say that to men, but you can’t say that to God. Because the Bible says, behold the day cometh that shall burn — as a what? —as an oven. And those who do wickedly, He will slay them and leave them neither root nor branch…The War of Armageddon is to decide who will live on this earth.”
• “I’m saying to the Jews: if you want salvation, if you want to get back into the paradise of God, come with the Messiah, that’s your ticket. Some of you have already recognized your brother as that. But that’s an invitation to them to break them apart from those who are about to be destroyed. God is not unjust; when he kills you, you know you deserved it.”

NGO attempts to rectify the situation 

Before the conference, a group of local Jewish and LGBTQ+ organizations including the ADL Midwest and the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Chicago, wrote to the company which owns the Wintrust Arena where the event was held in an attempt to dissuade them from hosting the conference, according to the ADL. 

The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), a Jewish human rights organization based in the United States, released a statement on the topic in which their Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action Agenda, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, roundly condemned Farrakhan as well as Ticketmaster for their involvement in the event. 

“We have tracked and denounced Farrakhan and his trail of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitic incitement for four decades," said Cooper. Yet, the godfather of hate has rarely been publicly criticized. Indeed, access to this year’s speech was handled by Ticketmaster, at a time when American Jewry is reeling from violent anti-Semitic hate crimes. Farrakhan has rarely been held accountable for his serial Jew-hatred and in 2023, Ticketmaster and others have monetized his hate and expanded the reach of his hatred."

Ticketmaster, according to the ADL, also did not take any action ahead of Saviours’ Day.

According to a report from ynet, Ticketmaster's CEO Michael Rapino received an open letter organized by the organization Creative Community for Peace (CCP), which is, per its website, a non-profit entertainment industry organization comprised of prominent members of the entertainment community to educate about rising antisemitism within the entertainment industry and to garner support for Zionist initiatives.  

Businessman Haim Saban, philanthropist and retired film studio executive Sherry Lansing, and songwriter Diane Warren were among the signatories on the CCP letter.