A call to order, accompanied by a historical update. On Friday, December 2, President Joe Biden claimed it on Twitter ” (them) politicians (American) should publicly condemn anti-Semitism wherever it exists.” instead of “offer him a platform”. “The Holocaust happened. Hitler was an evil person.” he continued, referring to the outcry that rapper Kanye West had caused the previous day after confessing his admiration for Hitler during an interview with an American conspiracy theorist.
A few days earlier, the artist was still having dinner in Florida with white supremacist Nick Fuentes – known for his questioning of the Holocaust – in the company of former Republican President Donald Trump. Scenes supporting the idea, analysts say, are that religious intolerance and conspiracy theories against Jews have become substantially normalized in American society. In mid-November, the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, had thus sounded the alarm and announced the lifting of the anti-Semitic threat to the ranks. “of national priority”, when the Jewish community was “struck from all sides”, in a climate of resurgence of verbal and physical violence directed at her.
“Public Debate”
On the other side of the Atlantic, these attacks come mainly from supporters of the Trumpist movement Maga (for “Make America Great Again”, “Make America Great Again” Ed) and the far-right conspiracy fog QAnon. But also for that reason, from now on, very influential personalities from show business – like Kanye West, or the basketball star Kyrie Irving, who recently promoted an anti-Semitic film.
“When you have celebrities who espouse classic anti-Semitism like Kanye West, who has more Twitter followers than there are Jews on planet Earth, that’s something that’s going to enter the debate. Audience”, decrypted to AFP Oren Segal, of the organization for the fight against antisemitism ADL. Before they again noted that several elected Republicans had attended a pro-Trump conference organized by Nick Fuentes a few months ago.
Thus, for him, Trumpism plays an important role in trivializing these calls to hatred. “It is understood as the normalization of disinformation and conspiracy theories, and the normalization of anti-Semitism is not far away”, he explained. Sulphurous speeches with very real consequences, he finally insisted, citing the bloody attacks by white supremacists against the synagogues in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – the deadliest anti-Semitic massacre in US history, which had left eleven dead in 2018 – and from Poway, California – which killed one person in 2019.
“Protean Roots”
In the US, the fact that Kanye West and Kyrie Irving are both African-American has raised fears of an increase in anti-Semitism in the black community and among young people. But for Cheryl Greenberg, a professor at Trinity College, it’s a more general one “tendency to trivialize extremist ideas”which is inculcated on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Holocaust by the younger generations who are more aware of the problems of other communities who are marginalized or oppressed because of their ethnic or sexual identity.
“By making anti-Semitism the central issue, Jews have complicated the dialogue with many other communities”further analyzed the specialist with AFP, specifying that the traditional alliance of the Jewish and African-American communities, which dominated in the years 1950-1960 for the defense of civil rights, has today been defeated.
Last year, a high-profile survey attempted to identify perceptions of anti-Semitism in the Jewish community. Title The State of Antisemitism in America in 2021 and conducted by the research organization SSRS among 1,500 Jews aged 18 and over (1), it showed that 86% of respondents believed that “Extremism in the name of Islam today poses an anti-Semitic threat in the United States”of which 50% perceived it as “moderately severe” Where “very serious”. In addition, 91% of respondents believed that the far right posed an anti-Semitic threat, and 71% the same for the far left.
Finally, 53% of respondents said they were satisfied with the anti-Semitism policy led by Joe Biden at the time, compared to 28% who disapproved.
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