We need to talk about antisemitism

Comment writers discuss the problematic stance of Kanye West and the proliferation of antisemitic hate speech in society

Kanye’s Dark Twisted Fantasy

DESPITE being one of Kanye’s most popular songs, ‘Dark Fantasy’ acts as a fairly accurate description of the current situation the rapper finds himself in. I toyed between this and ‘All Falls Down’ as the title of this article but I think that this (minus the beautiful) is more appropriate.

It’s disheartening when someone you think so much of states in a tweet that he’s “going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE”. The post appeared on the platform in early October and since then, the star has continued to rapidly fall from grace. Some of West’s most recent comments have been unacceptable and outrageous — his rant on Alex Jones’ show being the most prominent example. And when the man who was recently ordered to pay almost $1.5bn for falsely claiming a 2012 school shooting was a hoax thinks you’ve gone too far, it’s clear that the road you are walking down is towards the greatest of extremes.

I could go on for a while about Kanye’s music; I remember well when his album ‘The Life of Pablo’ came out. It was early February 2016 and me and my mates listened to the songs for literally weeks trying to narrow down our favourite tracks. ‘Waves’, ‘Famous’ and ‘Wolves’ were the outcome and remained in my playlist up until he decided to threaten me as a result of my religion.

With Kanye, I feel that it’s possible to continually discover gems in his albums which you might not have heard of but for me, a Jewish fan of Kanye, the rap per’s actions and words in recent months have been frightening. I don’t think I can in good conscience continue listening to his music. I don’t want to force others to stop listening (music of all things is a personal choice) but the idea of promoting his words, image and brand just doesn’t sit well with me.

Truly, he is one of the greatest mu sicians of the 21st century but I think his recent actions have unfortunately tainted him and his work forever. Some have drawn comparisons between West and Wagner, who also harboured anti semitic views — although I find there is a distinct difference between the two. The platform Kanye holds is incompara ble to Wagner’s and because of modernday technology, his views and words are able to reach so many. West’s actions will inspire others to follow his lead and the ac tions that people could take after listening to the dangerous rhetoric that he is promoting, further fill me with deep concern.

Kanye now is banned from Twitter, for tweeting an image of a swastika (controversial to most). Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he’d “tried his best” to stop Kanye from posting the content, and finally banned West. It is frankly heartbreaking listening to what Kanye is saying about Jews. The more and more I read about him and his actions, the more I am reminded of a quote from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “Jews cannot fight antisemitism alone. The victim cannot cure the crime. The hated cannot cure the hate. It would be the greatest mistake for Jews to believe that they can fight it alone. The only people who can successfully combat antisemitism are those active in the cultures that harbour it.”

With Kanye now apparently cancelled it fills me with hope that the world has woken up and realised that, in his words, “we’ve been putting up with your [his] shit just way too long”.

Jews Don’t Count

FUCK the Jews. That was the message blaring out of a public sound system from a car in St John’s Wood, a heavily populated Jewish area, on one day in 2021. A message many would hope to be a singular event.

What may be less well known is that this behaviour and this language, though perhaps not as explicit, is in fact relatively commonplace. While I personally have been lucky enough to have not yet experienced any antisemitic abuse, almost all Jews older than me with whom I’ve spoken, have.

To the contrary, many of them would never dream of throwing around

Those throwing around antisemitic abuse do not intend to be racist. To the contrary, many of them would never dream of throwing around racial epithets, slurs or stereotypes about other racial minorities. Equally, if they were aware they were speaking to a Jew, they would almost certainly never articulate it. Why, then, do they believe that these utterances are excusable, or even accepted in the civilised world?

As masterfully argued in David Baddiel’s book and documentary with the same name as this article, some people of middle-class stock and oftentimes liberal or progressive views do not see Jews as a minority. Instead, we are seen as some odd, quirky group of White people whose religion seems to be based on a culture of grievance and self-imposed suffering. Simultaneously, while we may not be the omnipotent people imagined by that universally recognised monster Adolf Hitler, if so many people say that we control the media, we control the economy, and so on and so forth — well, after a while, there must be some truth to it, right?

This is not the average person’s thought process when considering the world Jewry. I hope to believe that many of those reading this are smarter, more logical and more reasonable than that. But many in this world are sadly more ignorant than that and believe there is some degree of truth to seeing Jews as a privileged class who have far more power than we should ever be due.

Kanye is perhaps the most extreme example of how this long fiction of so-called Jewish supremacy has been granted yet another chapter, but he is by no means the first to attack and undermine Jewish culture in recent times.

To borrow again from Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count, so-called actor and activist John Cusack retweeted an image of a fat hand added with a Star of David crushing those below it with the quote: “to learn who rules over you, simply find out what you are not allowed to say”. Former MP and Baroness Jenny Tonge similarly tweeted: “Why have the Jewish people been persecuted over and over again throughout history? Why? I never get an answer. If we discussed this we would be accused of antisemitism.”

Those who live in civilised society, particularly liberals and progressives, love to imagine that racism against Jews is something consigned to the past. Unfortunately, it has merely turned into something far more insidious. Morphed into a collection of myths and slander just about possible to believe but at the peril of the Jewish community. That is unless something happens to stamp it out. Something to finally proclaim that Jews DO count. What this could be remains to be seen.

Charlie Gershinson, News Editor