Kanye West or the old anti-Semitism always

In recent weeks, Kanye West has once again made his mind public, from his “love” for Hitler and the Nazis to his appeal to Jews as “financial engineers,” in addition to a “death-with-three” threat against the Jewish city. . Mysterious and incomprehensible, but completely aggressive.

Following this, West was blocked from social media and criticized by the Biden administration after accusing Jews of canceling “anyone who opposes your ideology.”

And although those posts on Instagram and Twitter were deleted, after a short time for those who doubted the rapper’s ideological conviction, in an interview with Fox News he accused former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner of orchestrating the Abraham Accords between Israel and the Gulf states “to earn of money”.

It is fruitless to discuss whether West allows himself such comments because he believes that being one of the most famous people in the world, who, in addition to making millions from his music and controlling a brand empire, makes him untouchable or if it is his supposed mental disease loosens his tongue.

After claiming “I can say anti-Semitic things and Adidas can’t stop me” referring to his commercial relationship with Adidas, the mega-company contradicted him, even losing millions by terminating the rapper’s contract.

But it doesn’t really matter why West says what he says. Revealing his hatred and belief that he is being persecuted by Jews may be a symptom of mental illness, but his anti-Semitic ideology, while misguided, is not a symptom of illness. We know that throughout history there have been and are people who believe in grandiose anti-Semitic conspiracies, implausible but rooted, and yet perfectly sane, intelligent and even sensitive. Sensitive to other causes, i.e.

Hateful words and hateful actions

That West is going public with his opinion is very serious precisely because of its huge resonance and the impact it has on so many impressionable people, both children and adolescents and adults without education.

After Yeh’s wave of anti-Semitic outbursts, various racist and Nazi organizations in Los Angeles showed their support for him at a rally with banners saying “Kanye is right about the Jews.”

His serious comments do not go unnoticed, but rather in the context of global social upheaval, after a pandemic that not only claimed millions of lives, but also spawned rivers of disinformation, which, unfortunately, merge into well-known and traditional images. At the demonstration itself in Los Angeles, pamphlets were distributed that repeated, as if it were the Middle Ages and the plague, that the coronavirus was a Jewish invention.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) notes that attacks on Jews are only getting worse. Of the 4 billion respondents worldwide, over a billion expressed anti-Semitic views. Anti-Jewish incidents peaked in 2021 with 2,717 attacks, the highest number since ADL registration began in 1979. On average, there are 7 incidents per day. And all indications are that 2022 will break records.

And if all evidence indicates that hatred, and the incidents that display it, are alarmingly on the rise in the world at large and in the United States in particular, it is more than reprehensible that a public figure like West should use his words irresponsibly in front of an audience. millions who are only forming their opinion and identity. Hateful words too easily turn into hateful actions.

Finding causes and explanations for bad things that happen in the world is part of what makes us human, but antisemitism (like racism and sexism) must be fought for exactly what it represents: human failure, the simplification of finding a criminal. The Jewish scapegoat is a traditional thing in these cases, bred and perfected over the centuries, the inquisition, the pogroms, the blood libels… It ended in the most tragic way imaginable, the Holocaust, when six million deaths later we believed to have been extracted certain lessons, Kanye returns to the same old and familiar tropes. An unbearable cycle of hatred, which again makes all those who remain silent become accomplices.

If anti-Semitism is tolerated in public life, normalized, whether it be the pen of a poet, the speech of a politician, or the mouth of a rapper, it is not a symptom of insanity, social privilege or artistic sophistication, but degradation. a society that harms everyone, not just Jews.