by Fern Sidman in The Jewish Voice

Since the news emerged over the weekend concerning the now infamous meeting that former President Donald Trump held at this Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida with disgraced rapper Kanye West,  and the avowed holocaust-denying, white supremacist, Jew-hater Nick Fuentes, condemnations of all stripes have been flowing in.

Over the past few weeks, Kanye West, now referred to as “Ye,” has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories and tropes to his many followers, and West’s tirades have incited other antisemitic acts in Los Angeles and Jacksonville, Florida. Nick Fuentes is an alt-right media personality who espouses white supremacism and denies the Holocaust. Since 2017, he has been hosting a livestream show called America First, where he regularly spouts dangerous and bigoted views.

Early last month, West announced that he would go “death con 3 on Jewish people.” Twitter removed his hateful tweet, and over a dozen companies with which West was working severed their contractual ties with the rapper after he adamantly refused to apologize or rescind his odious remarks.

While politics makes strange bedfellows, many are in a quandary as to why West brought Fuentes to the former president’s estate. After all, Fuentes is an equal opportunity hater and his racist credentials indicate that his distaste for blacks is right up there on top of his priority list. One can only surmise that the common denominator between West and Fuentes is that they share a palpable opprobrium for Jews.

The problem here is Trump’s involvement with both of them. As the former president’s political alliances continue to rapidly evaporate before his very eyes and others have made it abundantly clear that they are distancing themselves from him, including his daughter Ivanka who has voiced her wish not to be an active participant in his presidential campaign, Trump is now grasping for straws.  It appears that just about anyone who gushes over him, especially on prime-time television, as did West, is indeed a true friend and is now eligible to be invited to his home to dine with.

For Trump to have allowed West to bring the White Supremacist, Holocaust denier and all-around vile Jew hater, Fuentes, with him places Trump in the kind of public relations nightmare that is almost impossible to wake up from.

The CJV underscored that West himself should not have been admitted to Trump’s estate without clear repudiation of his own antisemitic statements.

“It’s contradictory that former President Trump, who has done so much for the State of Israel and for the Jewish community, would meet with someone who has expressed open hostility against the Jewish people,” said CJV Southern Regional Vice President Rabbi Moshe B. Parnes, who leads an advanced Rabbinical seminary less than an hour from Mar-a-Lago. “Trump should have condemned West’s antisemitism before the meeting, and repeated it at the meeting, so it is past due for him to speak out. As he said himself when he introduced his Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism, ‘the vile, hate-filled poison of anti-Semitism must be condemned and confronted everywhere and anywhere it appears.’”

The Coalition for Jewish Values represents over 2,000 traditional, Orthodox rabbis as the largest rabbinic public policy organization in America.

See the full article in The Jewish Voice

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