After sitting for a two-part interview by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson in which he aired various outlandish opinions, including a criticism of the Abraham Accords, Kanye West took to Instagram to accuse a fellow entertainer of being controlled by Jews. He then used Twitter to threaten that he would be “going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also” [sic]. Both social-media sites, where the wildly successful hip-hop star—who in 2021 legally changed his name to “Ye”—has millions of followers, suspended his accounts. Stephen Pollard comments:

Apart from my incredulity that Twitter actually acted to remove an anti-Semitic post—most of the time it seems to rely on them for business—what struck me most was how this was reported. Near universally his words were described as anti-Semitic. Now this might not seem the most noteworthy aspect of this story, given that they were indeed anti-Semitic. But you hardly need me to tell you that, more often not, even the most blatantly anti-Semitic statement is usually reported as “allegedly anti-Semitic.” Write that Jews kill babies to suck their blood and the likelihood is you will be described as having written an apparently or allegedly anti-Semitic sentence.

But it was, as I say, too good to last. In the days after the first reports, two main themes have emerged. First—and most ludicrously—that Ye’s words should not be interpreted as antisemitic. . . . [Second], is that what Ye said doesn’t really count because they are clearly the words of someone who is, to use the technical term, off his trolley.

Yet, Dominic Green contends that—anti-Semitic though West’s words were—the rapper should be allowed some consideration given his history of mental illness:

[West’s] manic outbursts have long been the subjects of cruel jokes. It is crueler still for Fox News to put on air someone who is plainly ill, especially when he’s educated himself on the Internet.

Compare West to Roger Waters, who turned up over the High Holy Days in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. Waters, who insists that he has nothing against Jews, only the existence of Israel, said that British and American Jews bear responsibility for Israel’s actions “because they pay for everything.”

Roger Waters will always be a delusional bigot. But Kanye West, who has performed in Israel, will recover from his delusions and their bigotry. He deserves a break.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”