Demi Lovato, who was raised Christian and has Jewish heritage, just took a trip to Israel. She was baptized in the Jordan River, toured the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, and visited a center for children with special needs. Pretty ordinary, right?
Apparently no. After posting about her recent trip on Wednesday, Lovato quickly disabled comments for the photos and apologized on her Instagram story for the crime of traveling.
“I accepted a free trip to Israel in exchange for a few posts,” she said. “No one told me there would be anything wrong with going or that I could possibly be offending anyone. With that being said, I’m sorry if I’ve hurt or offended anyone, that was not my intention.”
She grumbled that no one told her there would be backlash, and she emphasized that the trip was meant to be a spiritual experience, not a political statement. She said she’s “sorry for thinking this trip was just a spiritual experience.” Why? It was.
In all of her posts about the trip, Lovato said nothing about the Israel-Palestine conflict. The singer was among millions of tourists who visit Israel each year. While we’re getting angry at celebrities for going abroad, where was the outrage over Katie Holmes and Idris Elba visiting Saudi Arabia, with its awful human rights record, last year?
It’s unclear whether the backlash was just in her Instagram comments, but it’s disappointing to see the star cave to an online mob and apologize for something so innocuous.
If Lovato is overly skittish about social media, though, it’s because she’s faced backlash before. She took so much heat for laughing at jokes about rapper 21 Savage in February that she deleted her Twitter. It can be difficult to be a public figure on social media, but that makes it even more important to stand your ground in the face of controversy that shouldn’t be there in the first place.
“There is something absolutely magical about Israel,” Lovato said in her first post about the visit. “This trip has been so important for my well-being, my heart, and my soul.”
Since she’s decided to cave to politically correct trolls, it’s too bad she can no longer embrace that same sense of peace.
