A rise in anti-Jewish rhetoric, propagated by a well-known rapper, an NBA player, and other prominent individuals, is fueling fears that public personalities are normalizing hate and increasing the likelihood of violence in a nation where antisemitism has already seen a substantial rise.
It has concerned American Jewish community leaders and specialists on extremism to witness well-known public figures using antisemitic slurs in ways that have been frowned upon for many years.
Some claim it evokes a worse period in American history when influential people habitually disseminated rumors against Jews.
At Mar-a-Lago, former president Donald Trump hosted a white nationalist who denied the Holocaust.
Ye, a rapper, admitted in an interview that he loved Adolf Hitler. Kyrie Irving, a basketball player, was seen promoting an anti-Semitic movie on social media.
In response to Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk’s “amnesty” policy for suspended accounts, neo-Nazi trolls are screaming to return.
These are not lone wolves or idiots no one has ever heard of, writing emails from their parent’s garage.
According to Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, a prominent member of South Florida’s Jewish community, everyone should be apprehensive when prominent mainstream cultural, political, and even sports figures legitimize hate speech.
When there is a “public debate of things that used to be beneath disdain,” according to Northwestern University history professor Peter Hayes, who specializes in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, normalizing antisemitism is a “serious possibility.”
Hayes remarked, “I’m apprehensive about that.
It’s one of the many ways America needs to gain control and stop experimenting with potentially lethal notions and ideas.
Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes were guests of Trump on November 22 for dinner at his Florida residence.
When a white nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, erupted in violence in 2017, Fuentes was a student at Boston University.
He became an internet celebrity who disseminated antisemitic and white nationalist ideas on his platform.
“America First,” a far-right extremist movement led by Fuentes, has “Groypers” among its adherents.
Ye and Fuentes both appeared on the Infowars program on Thursday, hosted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Ye increased the rhetoric that cost him an extensive business agreement with Adidas when he praised Hitler during the conversation.
Two of the country’s top proponents of antisemitism were “breaking bread with the erstwhile head of the GOP,” according to Jonathan Greenblatt, national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, which he described as shocking and worrisome.
“This, in my opinion, represents the normalization of antisemitism. In a way we hadn’t seen before, it is now an integral component of the political process, according to Greenblatt. “And that’s not just a Republican thing. The issue transcends the Republican Party. It is a societal problem.”
According to Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America, a group that supported a lawsuit against the Charlottesville rally organizers, most people in the country understood it was “beyond the pale” when torch-carrying white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia’s campus on the eve of the 2017 rally.
When political figures and others spread the same conspiracies in increasingly mainstream ways, that is far more harmful than Nazis brandishing torches and yelling, “Jews will not replace us,” she said.
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