It’s a question: Should we even address him, the provocateur, and now we can also add “the Nazi” – Kanye West?
This troublemaker, addicted to negative attention, launched another out-of-control antisemitic campaign this week, which might yet be sold as a Netflix series.
West declared that he’s a Nazi, loves Hitler, won’t work with Jews, and finally released a fashion line featuring a single item: a t-shirt with a swastika, NIS 73 for those interested, shipping worldwide, including to Israel.
The problem is that this self-proclaimed, proud Nazi is also an award-winning, gifted musician who has sold over 140 million copies of his records in the past two decades and became a billionaire. As such, he’s also an opinion leader and prominent influencer, with 32.7 million followers on X/Twitter – double the number of Jews worldwide.
It’s clear that West speaks from ignorance. It’s doubtful he knows what happened to people like him in Hitler’s Germany, or that the Nazis believed in the organized murder of vulnerable populations, and that the swastika represents the inferiority of his own race, just like that of the Jews.
Kanye's hate speech track record
Despite his stupidity and empty words, there’s a direct line of action and consequence between the freedom of incitement West enjoys and the prevailing mood on the street, social networks, sports fields, and campuses in which it was reported that 83% of Jewish students in the US have experienced antisemitism.
My answer to the question that opened this article is “Yes – we must.” We shouldn’t dismiss statements, no matter how delusional, without an appropriate response, as words have power. Jewish actor David Schwimmer, known to us as Ross Geller, thinks so too.“His sick hate speech results in real-life violence against Jews,” Schwimmer wrote about West, “I don’t know what’s worse – the fact that he identifies as a Nazi or the fact that there is not sufficient outrage to remove and ban him from all social media at this point. Silence is complicity.”
Put West and Schwimmer side by side – their characters, images, and words side by side. There’s no doubt who you’d want as your neighbor and who you wouldn’t approach.
West may not understand, but the Nazism he admires threatens not only Jews, but also Italians, Swedes, Spaniards, and the entire free world, and by creating an identity between antisemitism and Nazism, he’s essentially saying that Jews are the world’s moral Iron Dome.
The European public knows this firsthand: The madness that flirts with Nazism, that sanctifies terror, hatred, ignorance, violence, vandalism, and everything evil – threatens them too. Today more than ever, they appreciate Israel for its stand against evil and the Jewish people for being the forward fortress against the new Nazism.
They appreciate it so much that the music world is responding with a reverse message: in the Eurovision Song Contest, betting sites rank Israel as a top favorite to win even before its representative song has been chosen.
The future that we all, nations of the world, are walking towards – is unknown. If we’re not careful enough, we might accidentally end up in West’s world.
And no one explains the dangers of that better than West himself.
The writer is WIZO president.