Kanye West Archives - Medialternatives

by davidrobertlewis - February 6, 2023February 26, 2023

Kanye West: Is South Africa becoming a safe haven for anti-Semitism, homophobia?

READERS may remember Kanye West, the musician caught in an Anti-Semitic spiral, having gone from Racist bad to Nazi worse in the space of six months. Now IOL claims “Kanye West says he’s ‘moving to South Africa’ to start a new life”. Of course, what IOL meant was there were ten Kanye West’s under the bed — the news outlet has to date refused to apologise for a fake multibaby story, even though editor Piet Rampedi subsequently resigned.

The article by ZamaNdosi Cele does make it clear that the video is “making the rounds on social media platform, TikTok” but readers are expected to trawl through twitter postings before discovering that the origin is a Kanye West parody account and the story has been trafficked by an international ring of news rappers.

There is certainly no attempt by Cele to gain any comment from a newsworthy source, nor is there a clear warning by editors that the material has been debunked and the outlet has been caught out fabricating stories before. Readers would need to move over to SA news site Briefly to discover the truth.

West earlier posted antisemitic tropes on his social media accounts, shared antisemitic conspiracy theories with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and later, on social media, threatened violence against Jews

You may thus be forgiven for thinking the IOL article appears to offer solace to Anti-Semites, wishing to come to South Africa to catch the homophobic, Pro-Palestine alliance emerging between the ANC and EFF whose lack of a clear majority has resulted in a shameful sacrifice of LBGT rights by the left?

In July 2022 the Al-Ghurbaah Foundation condemned a fatwa against homosexuality issued by the Muslim Judicial Council accusing it of “mere reliance on the classical scholarly opinions of the 9th century.”

Clearly the mainstream press in South Africa are living in Cloudcuckooland where Palestine and Israel are concerned. While Palestinian gunmen were massacring Jews praying at a Jerusalem synagogue on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the following items escaped editorial attention;

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Arabs made a “mistake” by rejecting a 1947 U.N. proposal that would have created a Palestinian state alongside the nascent Israel, in an interview aired on Friday.
African state Chad announced it will open embassy in Israel, four years after the countries restored diplomatic relations.
Senior Hamas Official Mahmoud Al-Zahar said An International Islamic Court ‘should be established to try Offenders Against Islam like those who recently Burned the Quran’. There is still no word on those Gazans currently locked up for being queer.
AP carried a story of the shock killing of a Gazan Ahmad Abu Murkhiyeh in October 2022 who ‘was a gay man who feared persecution for his sexuality’. The severed head and decapitated torso ofthe 25-year-old Palestinian were discovered on the side of a road in the occupied West Bank, “confirming gruesome details of a killing that shocked Palestinian society”.
On 20 January 2023 the European Commission issued a statement that it “considers that it is not appropriate to use the term apartheid in connection with the State of Israel. The Commission uses the non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA definition) as a practical guidance tool and a basis for its work to combat antisemitism. Claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour is amongst the illustrative examples included under the IHRA definition.”
Meanwhile South African rugby union seemingly oblivious to the above, withdrew its invitation to an Israeli team after calls for boycott over the weekend. One can only presume SARU still support the prohibition against Gay Pride in Gaza, and disagree with the Council of Europe and IHRA definition of AntiSemitism?

SEE: Yeezus you ain’t Jeezus

by davidrobertlewis - November 6, 2022November 16, 2022

Kanye West: Yeezus, you ain’t Mr Jeezus

KANYE WEST is certainly never one to avoid controversy, but over the past weeks, his pronouncements on social media have been called out for being nothing more than vulgar anti-Semitism. The result was the cancellation of lucrative contracts with sports brand Adidas, the shelving of an unreleased documentary, and a major talent agency CAA cutting ties.

Both singer Boy George and celebrity Kim Kardashian have spoken out against the rapper’s casual resort to hate speech.

Kardashian wrote that hate speech is “never OK” or “excusable.”

“I stand together with the Jewish community and call on the terrible violence and hateful rhetoric towards them to come to an immediate end,” she added.

Instead of issuing an apology, West doubled down along his bigot-alley pronouncements by claiming the term ‘anti-Semite’ was now akin to the ‘use of the N-word’, before taking a month-long ‘vow of silence’.

His absurd attempt at issuing reverse psychology certainly fell flat, since such an equivocation seeks to deprive black Jews and Jews of color with what is, in reality a stock defence against racism. The term Anti-Semitism was coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr to designate the anti-Jewish campaigns underway in central Europe at that time, it was later adopted by academics as a better sounding term than Judenhass, or Jew-hatred.

While some may feel a little sympathetic with West encountering contemporary cancel culture, and his views certainly deserve opprobrium, South Africans should feel ashamed that local news-outlets appear to have censored the news story.

One can only surmise that the reasons for doing so is because cautionary tales about bigots and thus the antics of the rapper also known as Ye, who just happen to be black, don’t sit well with editorial attempts to normalise anti-Semitism, at the same time Anti-Semitism’s proponents, seek to excuse racism whenever it appears convenient to do so.

A similar incident involving bizarre Holocaust statements (subsequently retracted) made by actress and talk-show host Whoopie Goldberg earlier this year, was similarly given the silent treatment by the local press, who seem to believe anti-Semitism doesn’t exist.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) ‘non-binding working definition of anti-Semitism’ states: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

In South Africa, a working definition might include ‘open hostility towards Jewish secular identity’.

If the brouhaha around David Unterhalter and the Judicial Service Commission was to be considered, a working definition could incorporate perverse anti-Secular ‘inquiry into religion’ in other words, religious inquisition or investigation that tends to avoid or exclude members of other religions, thus unfairly discriminating against members of the Jewish faith or persons who define themselves as Jewish