Kanye West’s brazen antisemitism gives hate a celebrity mouthpiece. ‘There’s real harm’
We’re used to seeing stars like Beyonce or Jennifer Lopez show their solidarity with anti-fascist protesters. West’s out-of-the-mainstream stance could turn that in the other direction. “There’s real harm done by him, and it shouldn’t be a platform for his type of hate speech, and it’s not what I want to live in.”
A video uploaded by West to his Instagram account Friday shows him speaking about the Jewish lobby before and during a performance at Madison Square Garden.
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“It’s so powerful to be able to just come in here and represent what I consider to be a safe space for every human being,” West said to the crowd. “This is my safe space.”
West is a frequent and outspoken supporter of anti-fascists worldwide. For example, he has attended and appeared at numerous #NotInMyName protests. And in 2010, he came to the aid of a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia, after an activist was attacked by a crowd of marchers.
In September, when Donald Trump proposed a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” West, a well-known supporter of far-right politics, tweeted, “Trump’s speech & policies have given us a chance to look inward & be proud of the greatness that is America. #StandWithKanye.”
In that speech, West also suggested that Trump’s election represented an “existential threat to the people of the United States of America.”
West went on to say that “the people who were saying these things don’t care about the Constitution. They don’t care about freedom. They don’t care about human rights. They don’t care about America.”
He added that we should “stand up for God and free people, and we’ll never be
