Kanye’s fall gives US Jews the chance to build new coalition of the decent - The Jewish Chronicle

Look on the bright side. The Kanye West flame-out is a disaster not just for the rapper himself, but also for the racist groups, black and white, that supplied his sick soundbites.

The condemnation has been universal, right and left. America’s antisemites are exposed and isolated, and their fellow-travellers are running for cover.

For years, Islamists, black nationalists and their radical-left enablers have masked incitement against Jews as legitimate criticism of “the Zionists”. Internet-savvy right-wing racists adopted that strategy as part of their effort to tiptoe towards acceptability. When Kanye used “the Zionists” to mean “the Jews”, the mask came off.

Americans do not like Hitler. They are proud, and rightly so, of the outsize American effort against Nazi Germany. They don’t like people who like Hitler, either.

They are patriotically revolted by white supremacists like Kanye’s chum Nicholas Fuentes. No amount of online irony can compensate for wanting Vladimir Putin to win the war in Ukraine just to troll America’s liberal, multiracial democracy. As for Kanye, Middle America’s worst nightmare is an unhinged black man in a mask saying: “I like Hitler”.

The American media are fundamentally frivolous. They follow celebrities and thrive on novelty. The media didn’t focus on the racist replacement theology of the Black Hebrew Israelites or the neofascist racism of Fuentes and his Groyper youth movement for moral reasons.

Louis Farrakhan GettyImages-1142491500

Louis Farrakhan (GettyImages)

They did it to exploit the spectacle of Kanye’s slow-motion self-destruction. Still, the effect is much the same. The Klieg light of public attention has shone into the darkest corners of American politics.

The American people now know the Black Hebrew Israelites and the online white Hebrew haters for what they are, deeply un-American.

This is a moment of opportunity for the major Jewish American groups: a chance to build a coalition of the decent across party lines. Donald Trump’s run for the Republican presidential nomination has been hobbled before the fundraising has even begun.

The MAGA sect’s Congressional representatives are without a leader. All the leading Republican prospects did the right thing, morally and politically, and lambasted Trump, Kanye and the racists to their right.

Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, she who once claimed that the Rothschilds were controlling the weather, said she wanted “nothing to do” with Fuentes.
The major Democrats also denounced Kanye and his retainers. The Zoomer who controls President Biden’s Twitter account let it be known that yes, the Holocaust really did happen.

Marjorie Taylor Greene GettyImages-1410509803

Marjorie Taylor Greene (Getty Images)

They went easy, though, on the anti-Jewish racism that they have sheltered for decades. The slurry of ideas in Kanye West’s addled mind didn’t come from nowhere. It is solidly entrenched within African American politics, and it reaches into the core of the Democratic coalition.

Polling consistently shows that African Americans are much more likely to hold traditionally anti-Jewish attitudes than any other group.

African Americans are also the Democrats’ most reliable demographic. Too many elected Democrats have turned a blind eye to their members’ dalliances with Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, explained away Jesse Jackson’s antisemitic statements, and posed for photo ops with Al Sharpton.

This has not been a sin of omission, committed absentmindedly. It is a sin of commission, committed deliberately, an immoral means to the ends of electoral advantage. Jewish Democrats have gone along with it or muted their criticism, to hold together the Democratic coalition and get their team’s candidates over the line.

There are many honourable exceptions. Ritchie Torres, the Democrat from the South Bronx, tweeted: “If you’re an apologist for antisemitism in your own backyard, you’re part of the problem.”

There are dishonourable exceptions too, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes and Ilhan Omar, who have incited against “the Zionists” but now signal their virtue by denouncing antisemitism without naming the full scope of its manifestations.

Under the leadership of ex-Obama staffer Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League has often seemed to see no evil to its left.

Now, it has attacked Kanye and named the sources of his racism with a moral vigour it last showed by supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. That was another vehicle for the mainstreaming of antisemitism in America.

It too ran into a ditch. The West crisis has forced both parties to reaffirm decency over division.

From now on, no candidate for elected office can plead ignorance. The lines of civility have been affirmed. It is now up to all Americans to defend them. This is an opportunity for the big Jewish American organisations. It will also be a test of their integrity.

Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor, a Washington Examiner columnist and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute

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