Kanye West, the malicious and ignorant American rapper/provocateur known as Ye, thrives on exposure and publicity. Without it, he’s like a fish out of water, bereft of oxygen.
In the past few weeks, he has maligned Jews with a series of vile and crude outpourings of antisemitic insults and conspiracy theories. Instead of coming to his senses and cutting his losses, he keeps coming back with yet more misbegotten mouthings, all of which firmly establish him as a miserable bigot on the alt-right.
In the latest installment of this tedious drama, he was entirely true to form.
About a week after dining with Donald Trump at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida, West, along with the antisemitic propagandist Nick Fuentes, appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars show. Incredibly enough, West went out of his way to praise Adolf Hitler, thereby drawing further opprobrium.
“I see good things about Hitler also,” said West, his face bizarrely covered by a black ski mask. “This guy … invented highways, invented the very microphone that I used as a musician, you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good, and I’m done with that. I’m done with the classification, every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.
“I like Hitler,” he added for good measure. “They (the Nazis) did good things too. We’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time.”
As if this was not enough, West subsequently posted a highly offensive and provocative picture on Twitter of a swastika interlaced with a Star of David and captioned with these meaningless words: “Love everyone #lovespeech.”
Within hours of West’s offensive tweet, the current owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, suspended his account, saying he had “violated our rule against incitement to violence.”
On the same day, the conservative social media platform Parler announced that West’s proposal to buy it had been cancelled. Not even Parler, a sanctuary for extremists, can stomach his revolting antics any longer.
West, who recently announced his intention to run for the U.S. presidency in 2024, is a rabble-rouser of the worst sort, an African American Uncle Tom who consorts with and appeals to racists, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis. West is the scum of the earth.
Given his fascistic political and ideological predilections, it was hardly surprising that he was so complimentary of Hitler, the incarnation of evil who ignited World War II and conceived the Holocaust.
Speaking to Jones, West chose to accentuate the positive about Hitler. He alluded to the fact that Hitler was instrumental in the construction of the autobahn, the modern highway network that elevated car travel to a new level. And he suggested that Hitler turned radio into a revolutionary propaganda tool.
However, he willfully ignored the most important reality, namely that Hitler was a profoundly disastrous force for Germany, Germans and the European continent.
Hitler’s Nazi regime persecuted its Jewish citizens to the fullest extent, totally reversing the emancipation of German Jews. Hitler launched an unprovoked and aggressive military campaign of territorial aggrandizement prior to 1939. He plunged Germany into a global war that exacted a terrible toll on its neighbors and itself. He targeted the Jews of Europe with a genocidal policy whose stain has forever blackened Germany’s image.
West’s knowledge of these seminal events is either skin deep or nonexistent, yet he had the temerity to lavish praise on Hitler, a racist who most likely would have rejected his humanity.
West should unequivocally be condemned. As President Joe Biden noted in a tweet on December 2, “our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides.”
“Silence,” he noted correctly, “is complicity.”
And yet African American leaders have been conspicuously silent in the face of West’s unhinged rants. So have some major figures in the Republic Party, notably Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the party’s presidential nomination.
Trump himself has been uncharacteristically quiet, reinforcing the impression that he tolerates racism and antisemitism, even though his daughter is a convert to Judaism, his son-in-law is a Jew and his grandchildren are Jewish.
American Jews who have voted for Trump should not deceive themselves. Despite his pro-Israel inclinations, Trump does not have their best interests at heart, as the sickening Kanye West affair illustrates.
