Ye gods! Give Kanye West a break - The Jewish Chronicle

A few years ago, I went to see The Rolling Stones. Keith Richards had lately had another near-death experience getting out of his tree; falling from a palm tree headfirst onto the beach, in fact, causing a cranial injury so severe that the doctors told him he could never take cocaine again. It seemed ominous, so I thought I’d see the Stones while a critical mass of them were still alive.

The concert was at Foxborough, the giant stadium where the New England Patriots play. The support act was still on when we arrived, so we got as far away from the stage as we could. From the bleachers at the wrong end of the stadium, we could make out a little speck of a man running around the stage and up and down the runway, waving his arms and shouting furiously.

One of the things he kept shouting was his name, so eventually we realised we were listening to a rapper called Kanye West. This was before Kanye West became Mr. Kim Kardashian, and then, apparently having mislaid some of his marbles, a brand called “Ye”, because, as he explained to the radio host Big Boy in 2018, “I believe ‘ye’ is the most commonly used word in the Bible, and in the Bible it means ‘you’. So it’s I’m you, I’m us, it’s us.”

As with the “Ye” bit, the spellings are all original. Sadly, Ye is no longer us. “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On Jewish People,” he tweeted on Sunday. “The funny thing is I actually can't be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.”

Oh no honey pic.twitter.com/uqis5gfItF
— Lahav Harkov (@LahavHarkov) October 9, 2022

West meant DEFCON 3, the US military’s term for being halfway to a nuclear launch. He has had a busy time, beginning with wearing a “White Lives Matter” t-shirt at a fashion show in Paris last week. Some might think that a fashion show in Paris is exactly the right place to wear something daft and tasteless, but the slogan, the ADL says, is associated with white supremacists.

West then went fully postal last week on Instagram to his 18 million followers, and gave a two-part interview on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox. West told Carlson that Jared Kushner had manipulated Donald Trump and organised the Abraham Accords for personal advantage. Sticking to geopolitics, he said that “the media” want Lizzo, a portly flautist noted for showing her bottom in public, to stay fat, in the name of the “demonic” idea that stuffing your face is healthy.

“Why do you think they would want to promote unhealthiness?” Carlson asked. As the host of the most popular cable show in America, he is as much “the media” as anyone is.

“It’s a genocide of the black race,” West explained. “They want to kill us anyway they can.”

Ye West, formerly known and Kanye West, mentions Black genocide, the KKK, native tongues, English, Jewish people, demonic unhealthiness, say it loud I'm Black and I'm Proud, while Tucker Carlson stares at him. pic.twitter.com/ng5QSNhFLo
— Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) October 7, 2022

West is now suspended from Twitter and Instagram for antisemitic statements; the president of Iran is still holding the fort. West is possibly under sedation, too. In 2016, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after being hospitalised. His manic outbursts have long been the subjects of cruel jokes. It is crueller still for Fox News to put on air someone who is plainly ill, especially when he’s educated himself on the internet.

Compare West to Roger Waters, who turned up over the High Holy Days in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. Waters, who insists that he has nothing against Jews, only the existence of Israel, said that British and American Jews bear responsibility for Israel’s actions “because they pay for everything”.

Roger Waters will always be a delusional bigot. But Kanye West, who has performed in Israel, will recover from his delusions and their bigotry. He deserves a break. You could see the pain on his face as he told Carlson, “If we saw ourselves as a people, and not a race, then we would treat our people better.” That is the American problem in a nutshell.

The road to rehabilitation is long. There will be meetings with rabbis, a trip to the Western Wall, and another high-profile interview to apologise about the previous one. If anyone can, Kanye can. Just ye watch.

Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor, a Washington Examiner columnist and a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

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