It was another completely normal week here in America. In California, neo-Nazis rallied to the cause of the way-out Kanye West and hung banners from a freeway bridge, saying “Kanye is right about the Jews.” In Washington, DC, the January 6 committee summoned Donald Trump, just before next week’s midterms. In a world of his own, President Biden said that it was “immoral” for states to restrict children’s access to puberty blockers and sex-change surgery.
The Kanye West drama has reached its second phase. First, outrage. Second, reaction. Third, rehabilitation. His agents have dropped him, and so have all his corporate sponsors, including Vogue, Balenciaga, Gap and Adidas, though Adidas were so late to phase two that they risked joining West in phase three, reputational rehab.
The bad news is that it happened at all, but that is hardly news. It’s not even new. Jew-hating is a pathology. I dislike calling it “anti-Semitism”, by the way. That was a euphemism, designed to sanitize something dirty. It also presumes the existence of a Wagnerite fantasy of organized political “Semitism”.
It’s a pathology, so “Judeophobia”, Leon Pinsker’s term, is better. Like all pathologies, it presents sub-clinically and clinically. If it’s subclinical, it’s like a hobby. You might have morbid fantasies of Jewish power, but you’re otherwise able to pass yourself off as normal. If it’s clinical, you are delusional and should be munching on a Diazepam sandwich.
West went clinical. This is why I argued a couple of weeks ago that we should show a little compassion in judging him. If a person commits a crime while not in their right mind, the charge and the sentence are reduced. When this outrageous suggestion was published, a horde of cuddly Corbynites barraged me on Twitter. Many of them asked why I hadn’t extended the same compassion to Jeremy Corbyn.
I would have, had Corbyn had a history of bipolar illness, talked about how not taking his meds put him in contact with his “superpower”, and then gone so far off the rails that his ex-paramour, Kim Kardashian, had felt obliged to denounce him. Corbyn is apparently sane, his delusions are of the Marxist-Leninist variety, and Diane Abbott backed him. There is also a difference between the gibbering bigotry of a buffoon that no one takes seriously, and someone who runs for prime minister with the complete support of his party, Sir Keir Starmer included.
This suggests the alarming possibility that hating Jews is normal. I don’t mean we should accept it as normal, but that we should accept that non-Jews think it’s normal. Normality is a social consensus, so a minority is not in a position to set it. A person can be sub-clinically deluded, and no one knows until—and we’ve all seen it—they’ve had a couple of drinks or spent too long on the internet.
For this reason, we should take heart about the response to West. The guardians of normality did their job and policed the frontiers of decency. Strikingly, it was private companies that did this. The media, as usual, fanned the flames. The left affected outrage: connoisseurs of irony will long treasure the sight of Mehdi Hassan interviewing Ilhan Omar about what constitutes an acceptable level of Jew-hating.
The response on the right was more complex—in motivation, I mean, not intellect. Tucker Carlson seems morbidly drawn to any story that exacerbates racial friction. But there’s also the right’s ulterior motive, splitting African American voters from the Democrats, or “Blexit”, as the locals call it.
A prominent Blexiteer, Candace Owens, made an especially dim attempt to justify what West had said. Her British husband, George Farmer, is in the process of selling Parler, the right-wing Twitter clone, to West. And people say Jews control the media.
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor, a Washington Examiner columnist and a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
