When Kanye West, the rapper now known as Ye, unleashed a volley of antisemitism, people were appalled — but some nevertheless came to his defence.
West first accused another rapper of being controlled by Jewish people. Then he tweeted: “When I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Jews, he wrote, “blackball anyone who opposes your agenda”.
Subsequently, he redoubled his anti-Jewish comments in a stream of rambling conspiracy theories and paranoid fantasies.
His fans, who were said to be “heartbroken”, pointed out that since he was bipolar and manic-depressive he should be pitied rather than condemned. They thus downgraded his antisemitism to a rogue chemical spasm.
A few days later, in America, Paul Pelosi, husband of the Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, was attacked in his home with a hammer by intruder David DePape.
This attacker was involved with websites teeming with antisemitism and white supremacist language. There were claims that the Jews were behind the war against Ukraine and conspiracy theories from the far-right site QAnon.
Yet at one point, according to journalist Michael Schellenberger, DePape had also “lived with a notorious local nudist in a Berkeley home, complete with a Black Lives Matter sign in the window and an LGBT rainbow flag, emblazoned with a marijuana symbol, hanging from a tree”.
In other words, DePape couldn’t be pigeonholed — apart from his unambiguous antisemitism. Nevertheless, both the right and left did precisely that in order to score political points.
Thus several Democrats, in a charge led by Hillary Clinton, blamed DePape’s attack on “the Republican Party and its mouthpieces” that “regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories”.
For their part, some Republicans tried to mask the embarrassment of DePape’s right-wing associations by mocking him and spreading the unfounded claim that he had been in a gay relationship with his victim.
Making use of the Ye and Pelosi incidents for partisan purposes, either to demonise or excuse, is disgusting. It also masks the fact that misfits such as Ye or DePape draw on conspiracy theories or bigotry of different kinds because they may be at war with an entire society — and perhaps also with themselves.
They are thus often unhinged. Whether this means they aren’t responsible for their actions might be a matter of legal argument. But it should never negate the significance of what motivates them to commit such acts.
Antisemitism is often mixed up with a bunch of other delusions. That doesn’t mean antisemitism should be dismissed as no more dangerous than other fixations. It is a desire to rid the world of the Jews. As such, it is far more toxic than any other hatred. To a diseased mind at war with society, it is the ultimate incitement to violence.
Yet if it conflicts with an ideological or political agenda, it’s downplayed or ignored altogether.
Last week, a Palestinian Arab terrorist murdered 50-year-old Israeli Ronen Hananya and injured 5 others. But Hananya was murdered in Kiryat Arba in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, and so was considered a “settler”. Since such Israelis are thus blamed for their own murder, Hananya’s killing went unreported by western media.
It was part of an escalating campaign of Palestinian Arab terror attacks in which 27 Israelis and others have been killed so far this year. Who can be surprised? For Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, has been calling on social media for “an escalation against the… settler herds”. That is, Israeli Jews.
Nazi-style antisemitic tropes demonising Jews constantly pour out of the PA. None of this is reported by the western media, which instead turns the Palestinian Arabs into martyred victims and the Israelis into their oppressors.
The watchdog Honest Reporting has revealed that a letter published last month on the Jew-baiting website Mondoweiss, signed by more than 300 Palestinian and Arab reporters, supported several journalists who had posted pro-Hitler messages on social media.
One signatory herself compared the Israel Defence Forces to Nazis. Another likened Jews to “dirt and rats” and, in response to a tweet about the death of a young Palestinian, replied: “Do you still ask why Hitler killed the Jews?”
Read anything about that in the mainstream media? Of course not. It doesn’t fit the narrative.
West’s views about Jews haven’t appeared in a vacuum. He’s channelling Jewish conspiracy theories and links between the Jews and Satan pushed by Nation of Islam’s leader Louis Farrakhan, as well as claims by the Black Hebrew Israelite group that black people are the real Jews and that “so-called” Jews have stolen their identity and birthright.
These views are commonplace in America’s black community. Yet Farrakhan is still indulged by the Democrats, and you won’t hear a peep about black antisemitism from the mainstream media.
Instead, everyone is “shocked” by a rapper’s Jew-hatred, while a murderous attack by an antisemite on a public figure is turned into a political football.
As if antisemitism weren’t bad enough, this makes it truly heartbreaking.
Melanie Phillips is a Times columnist
