Simon Wiesenthal Center warns rapper has popularized antisemitic tropes, leading to massive increase of their popularity on social media.
By World Israel News Staff
Rapper and fashion designer Kanye West was the influencer who had the most antisemitic impact on social media in 2022, according to a new report from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
The NGO said that West had mainstreamed numerous antisemitic tropes, including the canard that Jews wield disproportionate power over the media and the economy, and that today’s Jews are impostors and black people are the so-called “real” Jews.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center noted that while none of the concepts pushed by West are new, they were broadcast to his huge audiences on social media platforms, which number in the tens of millions.
West “delivered or shared antisemitic conspiracies” to his followers, setting off a chain reaction which they said emboldened other entertainers to express antisemitic views, the NGO wrote in its 2022 annual antisemitism report.
Those social media posts “led to a Dave Chappelle wink and nod to millions of viewers on NBC’s Saturday Night Live…The slanders against Jews [were] then defended, supported and reinforced by hundreds of thousands, including, white supremacists and extremists among Black Hebrew Israelites.”
The NGO also touched on West’s “next contribution to mainstreaming and expanding antisemitism,” his dinner with former president Donald Trump and right-wing activist Nick Fuentes.
“Major social media platforms could have moved quickly to block the tsunami of hate based on their own terms of usage, but by and large they chose not to,” the report noted.
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas was also included in the round-up of major antisemitic incidents in 2022.
The PA’s pay-for-slay policy, which sees the entity reward terrorists who kill Jews with cash aid, and Abbas’ comments that Israel committed “50 Holocausts” against the Palestinian people were mentioned.
A spate of violent, unprovoked physical assaults against Jews on New York City streets was also noted in the report, along with the hostage-taking incident at a Texas synagogue which saw a Muslim gunman shot dead by the FBI.