Sir Rod Stewart has landed himself in hot water following a video he posted on Instagram in which he appears to jokingly re-enact an ISIS beheading. Who exactly he thought would find this video funny isn’t quite sure. The Islamic terrorist group won’t be thrilled that he’s making fun of them and as a joke, western audiences are finding it to be in very poor taste.
Stewart’s wife Penny Lancaster posted the video on her Instagram account. He recreated the ISIS execution in the sand dunes of Abu Dhabi when he was mucking around with his friends in the downtime during his worldwide tour.
As is customary with famous oldies rockers like Ozzy Osbourne and Mick Jagger, Stewart is still going strong and rocking away at the age of 72.
‘I hope Rod Stewart gets his knighthood stripped’
Angry Twitter users are responding to the iconic rock star’s video. Stewart claims he wasn’t mimicking ISIS, he was instead mimicking a scene from HBO’s hit fantasy drama “Game of Thrones,” but the social media users aren’t having any of that. When they look at the video, they see ISIS, and they get furious.
One tweet read, “I hope Rod Stewart gets his knighthood stripped,” before expressing concern that it will lead to similar acts as shown in the video being done to someone in Stewart’s family if it irritates the militant guys in ISIS.
The user said that “it’s not funny” to make fun of this kind of thing. Glen Oglaza, an ex-ITN reporter, said that Stewart’s mimicry of an ISIS execution is “deeply, deeply stupid,” calling him “a clueless prat.” Another said that Stewart is becoming “more stupid with age.”
Stewart is in the midst of a world tour
How exactly this controversy will affect his world tour remains to be seen, but Stewart was in Abu Dhabi amidst the tour at the time the video was shot.
Now, he’s headed to the United States (an ISIS hotspot given the current Islamophobic President, who is sure to welcome Stewart with open arms for ‘standing up to them’) for gigs in Florida and Las Vegas.
The rule with these things, like with Bill Cosby and Jimmy Savile and Mel Gibson, is that once they’ve done something bad or illegal or in poor taste or just generally wrong, you can no longer appreciate their art because it’s been tainted. But Rod Stewart is fantastic, so we’ll see.
