Recently, big-name Black entertainers like Ice Cube, Nick Cannon, Diddy, the Jacksons (Stephen and DeSean), and even beloved Black author Alice Walker, have spouted age-old anti-Semitic talking points—usually by quoting known bigot Louis Farrakhan—insisting that “the Jews” run everything, and locating Black liberation in anti-Jewish suspicion.
On his podcast, Cannon spoke to fellow anti-Semitic conspiracist Professor Griff, formerly of Public Enemy (he was kicked out of the group for his anti-Jewishness, specifically for calling Jews “wicked”), agreeing with Griff’s racist view that Jewish people control media and claiming that “Semitic people are Black people” so Black people cannot be anti-Semitic. After Cannon was dropped by ViacomCBS for his comments, Diddy then took to Instagram and invited Cannon to his network RevoltTV. On July 4th, Diddy’s RevoltTV broadcast a speech by Farrakhan—a man who has praised Hitler and repeatedly calls Jews “Satanic”—worldwide, and also shared a Farrakhan video on Twitter in which the Nation of Islam leader called the Jewish head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, “Satan” and claimed that “those of you that say you are the Jews, I will not even give you the honor of calling you a Jew. You are not a Jew. You are Satan, and it is my job now to pull the cover off of Satan so that every Muslim when he sees Satan, pick up a stone, as we do in Mecca.”
The rapper and actor Ice Cube, for his part, has shared a series of anti-Semitic memes, and even lobbed an anti-Semitic trope at Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for denouncing anti-Semitism in a Hollywood Reporter op-ed, accusing him of accepting “30 pieces of silver” in exchange for the column.
