Kayne West or the usual old anti-Semitism

In recent weeks, West has once again gone public with his views, from his "love" for Hitler and the Nazis to his reference to Jews as "financial engineers" and his threat to go "death by 3" against the Jewish people. Enigmatic and incomprehensible, but aggressive nonetheless.

After this, West was blocked on social media and criticised by the Biden Administration after accusing Jews of cancelling "anyone who opposes your ideology". 

And while those Instagram and Twitter posts were deleted, shortly afterwards, for anyone doubting the rapper's ideological conviction, in an interview on 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 make money". 

Whether West allows himself to make the comments he does 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 whether it is his alleged mental illness that loosens his tongue, is a moot point. 

After arguing "I can say anti-Semitic things and Adidas can't terminate me," referring to his business relationship with Adidas, the mega-company contradicted him, even though it lost millions, by terminating its contract with the rapper.

But it doesn't really matter why West says what he says. His public outspoken hatred and conviction of being persecuted by Jews may be a symptom of mental illness, but his anti-Semitic ideology, while misguided, is not a symptom of an illness. We know that throughout history there are and have been people who believe in tremendous, implausible but deep-rooted anti-Semitic conspiracies, and they are perfectly sane, intelligent and even sensitive. Sensitive to other causes, that is.
Hateful words and hateful actions.

For West to make his opinions public is extremely serious precisely because of their enormous impact and the influence they have on so many people who can be influenced, not only as children and adolescents, but also as uneducated adults. 

After the string of anti-Semitic outbursts, several racist and Nazi organisations in Los Angeles showed their support for him in a demonstration in which they carried banners saying things like "Kanye is right about the Jews". 

His serious comments do not fall on deaf ears, but in a context of global social upheaval, in the wake of a pandemic that has left not only millions dead, but also rivers of misinformation that converge, sadly, on familiar and traditional tropes. At the LA demonstration itself, pamphlets were handed out repeating, as if it were the Middle Ages and the plague, that the coronavirus was a Jewish invention. 

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) points out that attacks on Jews are only increasing. Out of 4 billion respondents worldwide, more than 1 billion expressed anti-Semitic attitudes. Anti-Jewish incidents peaked in 2021 with 2,717 attacks, the highest number since ADL records began in 1979. The daily average is 7 incidents. And all indications are that 2022 will break records.

And if all the data indicate that hate and the incidents that manifest it are on a worrying rise in the world in general and in the United States in particular, it is more than reprehensible that a person as public as West should make irresponsible use of his words in front of an audience of millions who are only just forming their opinions and identities. Hateful words turn into hateful actions all too easily.

Looking for reasons and explanations for the bad things that happen in the world is part of what makes us human, but anti-Semitism (like racism and sexism) must be fought precisely because of what it represents: a human failing, the simplism of looking for a culprit. The Jewish scapegoating is traditional in these cases, it has been brewing and being perfected for centuries, the Inquisition, the pogroms, the blood libels.... It ended in the most tragic way imaginable, in the Holocaust, and when six million deaths later we thought that certain lessons had been learned, Kayne returns to the same old familiar tropes. The intolerable cycle of hatred that makes complicit, once again, all those who remain silent.

If anti-Semitism is tolerated in public life, normalised, whether from the pen of a poet, the speech of a politician or the mouth of a rapper, it is a symptom not of madness or social privilege or artistic sophistication, but of social degradation that harms everyone, not just Jews.
 
Leah Soibel, founder and executive director of Fuente Latina