I’d always been scared to respond to anti-Semitism. That was before Kanye West, now known as Ye, became something of a one-man Ku Klux Klan, metaphorically planting lit-up wooden crosses on Jewish lawns. This past week has been horrible.
Last Friday the rapper was suspended from Twitter for tweeting an image of a swastika blended with a Star of David. This was only hours after Ye praised Adolf Hitler, said he loved Nazis, and denied the Holocaust in an interview with right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. (“I like Hitler …,” said Ye, wearing a black mask, before adding, “and he didn’t kill 6 million Jews”.)
Then, on Monday, Ye repeated claims he’d previously made that the Jews are, more broadly, a threat. Not only do we “control” the majority of the media, the banks, real estate and shopping centres, but we’ve colluded to “give America porn” to “dumb us down”, he said in an interview with Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes on his alt-right video platform, Censored.TV. The rapper, identified by McInnes as Ye, again appeared in a black mask.
“You can’t say, you can’t force your pain on everyone else,” Ye continued. “Jewish people, forgive Hitler today.”
Now, like most Jewish people I know, I’ve fielded my fair share of anti-Semitic remarks over the past three or four decades. “Aren’t Jews supposed to have horns?” a new friend at university in Canada asked me one day. He was joking, he said. He’d never met a Jewish person before. This is what he’d been told about us.
Read the article by Samantha Selinger-Morris in The Sydney Morning Herald.