Kayne West Continues Antisemitic Rants
Last month, the New York Police Department responded to 45 antisemitic attacks, which amounts to one Jewish person being attacked every 16 hours somewhere in the five boroughs of New York. The antisemitic attacks accounted for 60 percent of the hate-based crimes in the city in November. And those are just the incidents that were reported (many antisemitic attacks are never reported to authorities).
This statistic represents a shocking 125% increase over the same time period last year. Overall, the number of hate crimes against Jewish people in New York has increased significantly this year compared to 2021.
During the first nine months of 2022, the NYPD had 195 confirmed cases of antisemitic attacks—more than any other race or other minority groups. The incidents ranged from property damage to verbal harassment.
Just this past Sunday, a 7-year-old Jewish boy and his father walking out of a kosher grocery store on Staten Island were pelted with BBs shot from a passing car.
In November, two men—one of whom had a Nazi armband—were arrested for threatening to “shoot up a synagogue.” Other incidents included someone spraying “Free Palestine” on the side of a Chabad outreach vehicle, four people beating up a Jewish man in Brooklyn, a Hasidic woman and her son being shot with bullets from a gel pellet gun, and another man throwing rocks at a Jewish school.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, the New York incidents mirror a national trend in the US.
While antisemitism goes back millennia, and people have tried to wipe out the Jewish people since we became a nation, antisemitic statements by celebrities such as Kanye West and NBA star Kyrie Irving and others just throw fuel on the fire.
The radically antisemitic group, the Black Hebrew Israelites, were out in Brooklyn last weekend showing their support for Kanye—and Adolf Hitler.
“We support Hitler because Hitler was killing your people. You’re not a Jew, you’re the seed of the devil,” someone in the group told a Jewish person who was nearby during their demonstration.
In an interview on Alex Jones’s Infowars show, Kayne West—who now goes by Ye—spouted the praises of Hitler and the Nazis and doubled down on his claim that the Jewish mafia controls the media.
West said, “The Jewish media has made us feel like the Nazis and Hitler have never offered anything of value to the world. I see good things about Hitler, also.”
The interview was bizarre, to say the least. West was wearing a black ski mask over his face. At one point in the conversation with Jones, West made a veiled threat against incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. West made a play on Netanyahu’s name by pulling out of a bottle of Yoohoo and a fish-tank net (Netanyahu). Then he said in a high-pitched voice, mimicking Netanyahu, “I’m going to take your family away from you. We have to control the history books, we have to control the banks, and we have to go and kill people.”
West later tweeted a Star of David with a swastika superimposed on it. Elon Musk, Twitter CEO, removed the tweet and suspended West’s account for “incitement to violence.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) also condemned the statements made by West.
“History teaches us that words and ideas can have profound consequences. Kanye West’s serial anti-Semitism is now accompanied with the deconstruction of evil” (from a statement by the Simon Wiesenthal Center).
Ron Cantor
CEO of Tikkun Global
Tel Aviv, Israel
