Kanye West, Louis Farrakhan and Anti-Semitism

The “white extinction” conspiracy theory promoted by white supremacists holds that Jews promote integration, miscegenation and civil rights as part of a plot to replace the white race. Mr. West appears to believe the opposite. “Jewish people have owned the black voice,” he said on a recent podcast, later speaking of black Americans “being signed to a [Jewish-owned] record label, or having a Jewish manager, or being signed to a Jewish basketball team, or doing a movie on a Jewish platform like

Disney.

”

That sort of talk sounds very much like the ravings of Nation of Islam leader

Louis Farrakhan,

the world’s foremost black anti-Semite. “You can’t do nothing in Hollywood unless you go by them”—the Jews—Mr. Farrakhan said in a 2010 speech. “You a hip-hop artist? You can’t do nothing, you gotta go by them. You want to be a great sports figure? They own that plantation. Children of Israel, they got you jumping through hoops.”

Similarly, Mr. West’s claim that Planned Parenthood was founded by Jews to control the black population is the inverse of the white-supremacist notion that Jews have promoted abortion to eradicate whites. Again, Mr. West was merely echoing the Nation of Islam, which has long implicated Planned Parenthood in a supposed black “depopulation agenda.”

Or take Mr. West’s “lost tribes” theory. “When I say Jew,” he told

Tucker Carlson

in an unaired segment of an Oct. 6 interview, “I mean the 12 lost tribes of Judah, the blood of Christ, who the people known as the race black really are.”

This comes straight from black-supremacy doctrine. The Nation of Islam’s central tenet is that Jews swindled black people out of their birthright as God’s chosen. “The original Hebrews are black,” Mr. Farrakhan says in the same 2010 speech. It’s also the animating idea behind the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, two adherents of which shot and killed four people at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, N.J., in 2019.

Even Mr. West’s reported praise of Hitler echoes Mr. Farrakhan, who described Hitler as “a very great man” and expressed delight at comparisons between himself and the murderer of six million Jews.

None of this is surprising. Mr. West has had a longstanding relationship with Mr. Farrakhan, conferring with him on several occasions and visiting the Nation of Islam headquarters in 2005. In one song, Mr. West describes Mr. Farrakhan as his “sensei.”

Does it matter which strain of Jew-hatred Mr. West subscribes to? Distinctions matter—and in the American media’s reluctance to acknowledge black anti-Semitism, it has festered. The past few years have seen hundreds of attacks on Jews in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., and other Hasidic enclaves, most of them perpetrated by African-Americans.

Among other African-American assaults that have been memory-holed is the 2020 Hanukkah murder of a rabbi in his own home in Monsey, N.Y. The Black Lives Matter movement has an unsettling preoccupation with Israel, and one of its key bodies put out a platform accusing the Jewish state of genocide.  

There’s a reason for the confusion over the source of Mr. West’s racist outlook. The American commentariat now responds to discrete acts of Jew-hatred based foremost on their partisan utility. When Democratic Reps.

Ilhan Omar

and

Rashida Tlaib

tweet one of their occasional calumnies about Jewish money or Americans’ dual loyalty to Israel, the right notes the anti-Semitism on display, while the left either excuses or ignores it. Similarly, because Mr. West has supported

Donald Trump,

the former president’s enemies eagerly cast his statements about Jewish power as representative of a bigoted American conservatism. On the populist right, meanwhile, the firebrand commentator

Candace Owens

tweeted that Adidas “better pay Ye” after the company canceled its contracts with Mr. West.

It’s absurd to call Mr. West a purveyor of “white supremacy.” His racism arises from a different source, and it ought to be called by its proper name. Leviticus 19:17 states: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him.” In other words, confront your friend’s sin lest you share in his guilt.

Mr. Greenwald is executive editor of Commentary magazine.