And there you have it. Britain is a country where a musician who says ‘Heil Hitler’ gets to headline festivals while a musician who plays with a Jew from Israel gets cancelled. Threaten to go ‘death con 3 on Jewish people’ and you’ll be grand. Jam with a Jewish person and you’re toast. Selling T-shirts adorned with the swastika? No problem. Doing a duet with someone from the Jewish state? Don’t even think about it.
In the eyes of the keffiyeh-smothered windbags of the cultural elite, praising the Nazi monster who exterminated millions of Jews is a more forgivable moral error than hanging out with a Jew from Israel
That was my first thought upon reading that Kanye West will headline all three nights of the Wireless festival in Finsbury park in July. This is a man who has openly flirted with Jew hatred in recent years. His song ‘Heil Hitler’ has become a fave of the crank right. He once sold swastika tees through his website. He has promoted bonkers conspiracy theories about Jews.
Still, at least he didn’t do anything as dastardly as rub shoulders with a citizen of the Jewish state. That remains a cancellable offence. Last year Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead called off gigs in London and Bristol after the venues received ‘credible threats’. Greenwood’s sin? He was due to perform with Dudu Tassa, an Israeli musician. Using menace to shut down Israel artists is ‘self-evidently a method of censorship’, Greenwood said
Maybe he should have tried wearing swastika clobber or singing about Adolf. He’d have been forgiven soon enough and would be back on the gig circuit. Seriously, are we going to talk about this? The fact that under the faux-virtuous writ of Britain’s cultural establishment it is now riskier to write songs with an Israeli Jew than it is to sing affectionately about the man who murdered six million Jews?
Kanye’s Wireless slot has caused upset. It feels ‘deeply irresponsible’, says the Jewish Leadership Council. To laud a rapper who has ‘used his platform to spread anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi messaging’ is wrong and dangerous, the council says, especially given Britain’s Jews are facing ‘record levels’ of violent animus.
Some point out that Kanye has apologised for his old Jew-baiting. In January he took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal saying sorry for his past invective and insisting ‘I love Jewish people’. He blamed his antics on his bipolar disorder.
Okay. But do we think that a prominent musician who had celebrated the KKK, sold T-shirts featuring the lynchings of African-Americans and called black people a menace to humankind would be gifted the top slot at Wireless just a few months later? They absolutely would not. Every one of us knows this.
But Jews are fair game. Ours is the era of the microaggression. Misgender a genderfluid student and you’ll be hounded off campus. Ask a black person ‘Where are you from?’ and you might lose your job. Put up a sticker saying ‘Adult human female’ and you could get a knock from the boys in blue. But say ‘every human being has value… especially Hitler’ – as Ye once did – and you’ll be fine. A quick apology and you’ll be back in no time.
In the eyes of the keffiyeh-smothered windbags of the cultural elite, praising the Nazi monster who exterminated millions of Jews is a more forgivable moral error than hanging out with a Jew from Israel. Legions of pop stars, luvvies and literary bores have sworn never to associate with their counterparts from the Jewish state. We used to call this ‘collective guilt’ and ‘racism’. Now we call it ‘activism’.
How can I put this: if the sight of Dudu Tassa strumming his guitar offends you more than the sight of a man who once bigged up Hitler, then you might not be as anti-racist as you think. In fact, your moral compass is likely broken beyond repair. Watching the keffiyeh classes puff themselves up as wonderful anti-racists, even as they zealously forcefield their lives from the ideas, art and wares of the world’s only Jewish state, is too much to take. There’s a word for swiftly forgiving one-time admirers of Hitler and treating the Jewish nation as a pox-like entity whose art might harm your spiritual health. It ends with ‘ism’, yes, but it’s not ‘activism’.
Sadiq Khan says Kanye’s past remarks are ‘not reflective of London’s values’. Oh, I don’t know – a city where that unholy alliance of moneyed socialists and irate Islamists have been marching for nigh-on three years hollering for the destruction of the Jewish state and the globalisation of Hamas’s intifada? Kanye will fit right in.
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