Surge of anti-Jewish vitriol from celebrities stokes fears of normalising hate
- Leaders of the Jewish community in the US and extremism experts have been alarmed to see celebrities spew anti-Semitic tropes
- Donald Trump hosted a Holocaust-denying white supremacist at Mar-a-Lago while rapper Kanye West expressed love for Adolf Hitler in an interview
A surge of anti-Jewish vitriol, spread by a world-famous rapper, an NBA star and other prominent people, is stoking fears that public figures are normalising hate and ramping up the risk of violence in a country already experiencing a sharp increase in anti-Semitism.
Leaders of the Jewish community in the US and extremism experts have been alarmed to see celebrities with massive followings spew anti-Semitic tropes in a way that has been taboo for decades. Some said it hearkens back to a darker time in America when powerful people routinely spread conspiracy theories about Jews with impunity.
Former US President Donald Trump hosted a Holocaust-denying white supremacist at Mar-a-Lago. The rapper Kanye West expressed love for Adolf Hitler in an interview. Basketball star Kyrie Irving appeared to promote an anti-Semitic film on social media. Neo-Nazi trolls are clamouring to return to Twitter as new CEO Elon Musk grants “amnesty” to suspended accounts.
“These are not fringe outliers sending emails from their parents garage or idiots no one has ever heard of. When influential mainstream cultural, political and even sports icons normalise hate speech, everyone needs to be very concerned,” said Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, a leader in South Florida’s Jewish community.
Northwestern University history professor Peter Hayes, who specialises in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, said normalising anti-Semitism is a “real possibility” when there is a “public discussion of things that used to be beneath contempt.”
“I’m very concerned about it,” Hayes said. “It’s one of the many ways in which America has to get a grip and stop toying with concepts and ideas that are potentially murderous.”
Trump hosted West – the rapper who now wants to be known Ye – and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes for dinner at his Florida home on November 22.
Fuentes was a Boston University student when he attended a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that erupted in violence in 2017. He became an internet personality who used his platform to spread white supremacist and anti-Semitic views. Fuentes leads a far-right extremist movement called “America First,” with supporters known as “Groypers.”
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On Thursday, Fuentes joined West in appearing on the Infowars show hosted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. West praised Hitler during the interview, ratcheting up the rhetoric that already cost him a lucrative business deal with Adidas.
Jonathan Greenblatt, national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said it is astonishing and alarming that two of the nation’s leading purveyors of anti-Semitism were “breaking bread with the erstwhile head of the GOP.”
“I would characterise this as the normalisation of anti-Semitism. It has now become part of the political process in a way we hadn’t seen before,” Greenblatt said. “And that is not unique to Republicans. It is not just a Republican problem. It is a societal problem.”
Most Americans knew it was “beyond the pale” when torch-toting white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia’s campus on the eve of the 2017 rally, said Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America, a group that backed a lawsuit against organisers of the Charlottesville rally.
“What’s even more dangerous than Nazis with torches chanting, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ is when we have political leaders and others espousing those same conspiracy theories in increasingly normalised ways,” she said.
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Spitalnick said the virulent hatred that West has been spewing can make diluted expressions of anti-Semitism seem more normal in contrast.
“It’s crucial that we hold Kanye and Irving and these other public figures accountable for their anti-Semitism. But it means nothing if we’re not also recognising and holding accountable the ways in which this anti-Semitism and extremism has seeped into the mainstream of one of our major political parties and become commonplace in our political discourse,” she said.
Trump’s critics and even some of his allies condemned the former president for hosting Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. Trump claimed that he knew nothing about Fuentes before the dinner and defended his decision to host West at his club.
Twitter suspended West’s account this week after he tweeted a picture of a swastika merged with the Star of David. Musk tweeted that West had violated a rule against inciting violence.
Musk announced last week that his “amnesty” plan applied to accounts that haven’t “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.” Online safety experts predict that the move will lead to a rise in harassment and hate speech.
Groups that monitor Twitter for racist and anti-Semitic content say toxic speech already has been on the rise in the month since Musk took over the platform and fired thousands of employees. Content moderators were among those who lost their jobs.
Watchdogs also have rebuked Musk for some of his own tweets, including posting a meme featuring Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character that was hijacked by far-right extremists.
In April, the Anti-Defamation League announced that its annual tally of anti-Semitic incidents reached a record high last year. The organisation counted 2,717 incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism in 2021, a 34 per cent increase over the previous year and the highest number since the ADL began tracking the events in 1979.
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Generations ago, famous Americans including Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh unapologetically expressed anti-Semitic sentiments in a way that would have shocked Americans in more recent decades. Now, the internet and social media make it easy for world-famous celebrities to normalise anti-Jewish hate.
For somebody of Kanye’s status to praise Nazis and Hitler is “escalating from ugliness to a kind of incitement,” Greenblatt said. He noted that Jewish institutions already have to strengthen security to protect against attacks such as the one in which a gunman killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
“Our community still has to brace for the consequences of those ideas going mainstream,” Greenblatt said.
