The day after his participation in the opening ceremony of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Olympics, Ghali published a post on social media in which he expressed his disappointment at what happened on Friday evening at San Siro.
“Peace? Harmony? Humanity? I didn't hear any of this last night, but I heard it through your messages”, wrote the singer, who had performed during the ceremony, on social media Memorandum by Gianni Rodari. Ghali also thanked his supporters: “People are what really matters and, in a time of so much hate, please do not play their game and always respond as we would like the world to be.” The post ends with a quote from Rodari's own poem recited at the ceremony: “There are things to never do.”
The controversy began after Friday evening's performance, when Ghali was never featured in the foreground by the Rai director and his name was not even mentioned by the commentators, with his presence generically presented as “the moment in which we talk about the Olympic spirit and peace”.
The poem was recited in Italian and translated into English and French, but not into Arabic as the singer would have liked, who on Thursday published an open letter in which he revealed: “I know why they asked me to recite a poem about peace, I know that it could contain more than one language, I know that one language, the Arabic one, was too many at the last minute.”
The singer's participation had also sparked controversy in the previous days, with members of the League who had defined him as “a hater of Israel” and the minister Abodi who had assured that “Ghali's thoughts will not be expressed on stage”. The singer, in fact, became a symbol of the Palestinian cause in Italy after speaking about genocide and presenting the song My house in Sanremo 2024
