President Biden Speaks Out in Wake of Kanye West’s Antisemitic Remarks: ‘Silence is Complicity”
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President Joe Biden issued a forceful denunciation of antisemitism one day after Kanye West said, “I like Hitler,” denied that the Holocaust happened and posted a swastika on Twitter.
“I just want to make a few things clear: The Holocaust happened,” Biden wrote in the tweet, published Friday afternoon.
He continued: “Hitler was a demonic figure. And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides. Silence is complicity.”
West has been embroiled in controversy for more than a month due to his antisemitic remarks. In a Thursday appearance on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show, he doubled down, praising Adolf Hitler and saying Nazis “did good things too; we’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time.” (Hitler murdered approximately six million European Jews and at least five million prisoners of war.)
Elsewhere in the interview, West denied that the Holocaust happened, again praising Hitler by saying: “I’m not trying to be shocking, I like Hitler. The Holocaust is not what happened, let’s look at the facts of that and Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.”
And while he made the comments on an extremist, far-right show, the rapper and fashion designer has been embraced by even mainstream Republicans in recent weeks — some who have yet to denounce his latest racist remarks.
Just last week, former President Donald Trump — who recently launched his 2024 campaign for the presidency — had a private dinner with West and white supremacist Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
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Fuentes is a 24-year-old livestreamer who has been labeled a “white supremacist” by the U.S. Justice Department. Fuentes made headlines in 2017 for attending the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. In February 2020, his YouTube channel was permanently suspended for violating the company’s hate speech policy. He has since continued to spread Holocaust denialist and antisemitic views.
Trump issued a number of statements after the dinner — which took place last Tuesday — was first reported, saying he “knew nothing” about Fuentes, but stopping short of repudiating the white supremacist or his views.
“This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform in an initial statement. “We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. They then left for the airport.”
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Trump later revised his statement further, but still didn’t repudiate Fuentes or West, writing later that he was helping the rapper, who he called “a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black” after the rapper was ” decimated in his business and virtually everything else.”
In a third statement, Trump said he “had no idea what [Fuentes’] views were, and they weren’t expressed at the table in our very quick dinner, or it wouldn’t have been accepted.”
Trump has not yet issued a statement following West’s antisemitic remarks.
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Thee White House criticized Trump for hosting both West and Fuentes prior to the rapper’s latest remarks, with Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates saying in a statement: “Bigotry, hate, and antisemitism have absolutely no place in America — including at Mar-A-Lago. Holocaust denial is repugnant and dangerous, and it must be forcefully condemned.”
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