Here’s a surprise. For over two years the Mayor of London has maintained a Trappist vow over the regular hate marches which have defiled the streets of his city. There’s been not a peep out of him criticising the anti-Semitic slogans, banners or chants.
Now it seems that Sir Sadiq Khan has found his voice. Well, it’s more of a croak than a full-on holler, but small mercies and all that. He still can’t bring himself to say anything about the hate marches, but he’s come out with a statement criticising the booking of Kanye West to headline the Wireless festival in north London over three nights in July. Sir Sadiq says the rapper’s past comments are ‘offensive and wrong’, and ‘simply not reflective’ of London’s values.
You don’t say. There’s not much room for ambiguity about West – who now calls himself Ye. One of his singles was called ‘Heil Hitler’, with the lyrics ‘All my n****s Nazis, n***a, heil Hitler.’ He has described himself as a Nazi, sold merchandise with swastikas, praised neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, and made a series of anti-Jewish statements. Anti-Jewish, to be clear – not for West the attempted cop-out of calling himself ‘anti-Zionist’.
Not surprisingly, almost all the sponsorship and business deals he had secured over his years in the public eye collapsed as corporations decided being associated with a self-declared Nazi wasn’t a great look. And so, even less surprisingly, in January West issued an apology via a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, titled ‘‘To Those I’ve Hurt’. A man’s got to earn, after all.
West wrote: ‘I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people’. That ‘Heil Hitler’ title was obviously a slip of the pen, those lyrics a slip of the tongue. And just in case we doubted his sincerity – as if! – West offered the get out of jail free card adopted by those who find that their racism and bigotry isn’t getting a free pass. He wasn’t right in the head. Specifically, he hurt his head in a 2002 car accident and it was only in 2023 that his bipolar disorder was diagnosed. I see. That’s all okay then.
The thing is, when people tell you who they are, as West has done repeatedly over many years, it’s best to believe them. So West should be treated as the racist and bigot he has shown he is.
But the questions around this aren’t really for West to answer. He is what he is. The focus of this should be on the organisers of the Wireless festival, who saw West’s words and deeds – such as the ‘Heil Hitler’ song or the interview in 2018 in which he said because there had been slavery for 400 years, it must have been ‘a choice’ – and decided he was just the man they wanted to showcase for three nights. To date, they have not only refused to act to change this, they have refused even to comment. At a time when Jew hate is at record levels, and rising, the organisers have decided that now of all times they want to give a platform to one of the most notorious anti-Semites on the planet.
