Ye's repentance: A blip on the radar

 

By James M. Dorsey

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American rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has repented for his history of anti-Semitism.

Last week, Mr. Ye sought in New York absolution from Orthodox Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, an Israeli who serves as the chief rabbi of Morocco.

Holding hands with Mr. Pinto and speaking through a translator, Mr. Ye said he felt “really blessed being able to sit here with you today and just take accountability.”

Mr. Ye attributed his history of anti-Semitism to his bipolar disorder.

Mr. Ye’s track record includes a song praising Adolf Hitler, anti-Semitic tirades on social media, and kickstarting the mainstreaming of 27-year-old neo-Nazi white supremacist and Christian nationalist Nick Fuentes by introducing him to Donald Trump.

In February, Mr. Ye advertised a white T-shirt with a swastika during this year’s Super Bowl, the annual US National Football League championship.

Mr. Ye signalled his epiphany in May when he announced on X that he was "done with anti-Semitism," “love(s) all people,” and asked God to forgive him.

Alarmed by shifting attitudes towards Israel and rising anti-Semitism in Mr. Trump’s support base, Israeli officials likely see Mr. Ye’s repentance as a rare success of their multi-million dollar endeavour to halt a tidal shift among American Evangelicals and Make America Great Again (MAGA) figures away from Israel and towards the Palestinians that, at times, is laced with anti-Semitism.

The effort also aims to shape responses by Artificial Intelligence services such as ChatGPT, the first such attempt by a state, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

The newspaper reported the campaign focussed on "churches and Christian organizations in the western United States," targeting eight million churchgoers and four million Christian students.

The campaign seeks to counter "declining support for Israel among evangelical Christians" and "raise awareness of Palestinian ties to Hamas and support for terrorism."

It relies on "biblically based arguments highlighting the importance of Israel and the Jewish people to Christians" and assertions that "the Palestinians chose Hamas… they murder Christian aid workers… they celebrated (Hamas’s) October 7 massacre and shelter terrorists… (and that) Palestinians and Iran share genocidal intentions toward Israel."

Mr. Fuentes’ move from an outcast to mainstream influencer is emblematic of the tidal shift in American Evangelical youth attitudes towards Israel and the rise to prominence of non-Western Evangelicals, including Palestinians and Middle Eastern communities, who account for 70 per cent of the global Evangelical community, and may share the belief in End Times, but have not politicised it to align the religious group with Israel.

Interestingly, the shift in Evangelical youth attitudes hasn’t meant fewer negative views of Muslims. On the contrary.

The Islamophobia Index, which measures the degree to which people endorse anti-Muslim stereotypes, has risen sharply in 2025 compared to previous years. Among the general US public, the index jumped on a scale of 0 to 100 from 25 points in 2022 to 33 in 2025. Among white Evangelicals, the index jumped the most from 30 to 45 points.

Mr. Fuentes was long condemned and shunned by much of the far right and Mr. Trump’s Make America Great Again crowd because of his blatant anti-Semitism, support for Nazi ideology, denial of the Holocaust, and misogynist and anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

A series of recent events that have rattled Mr. Trump’s support base at the highest levels fuelled Mr. Fuente’s mainstreaming. Mr Fuentes is increasingly popular among disgruntled, racist, primarily Gen Z males, who describe themselves as “groypers.”

Last month, Tucker Carlson, whose online show is one of the Make America Great Again movement’s most influential media platforms, crossed a Rubicon by hosting Mr. Fuentes for a two-hour softball interview, viewed on YouTube by 5.7 million people that only a few months ago would have been unthinkable.

Earlier, Mr. Trump offered blatantly anti-Semitic podcaster Candace Owens a similar platform on his show.

Messrs. Carlson and Fuentes and Ms. Owens advocate the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory. The theory asserts that America’s elite, at times manipulated by Jews, aims to replace and disempower white Americans. The theory has sparked mass shootings in the United States, New Zealand, and elsewhere.

The theory does not just cast Jews in a negative light. As non-white immigrants, Muslims too are in the firing line, standing accused of eroding Western civilisation and threatening the continued existence of the white race.

Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes

The Fuentes interview contrasted starkly with Mr. Tucker’s view of Mr. Fuentes as recently as August, when the podcast host denounced him as a “weird little gay kid in his basement” who was a psychological warfare operative seeking to discredit genuinely right-wing, anti-war voices like himself and Ms. Owens.

Mr. Tucker apologised to Mr. Fuentes for his earlier remarks during their interview.

Mr. Tucker’s Fuentes interview brought into the open a chasm in Mr. Trump’s support base between supporters of the two men’s anti-Jewish, anti-Israel stance in the name of free and unfettered debate, and outraged supporters of the Jewish-majority state.

It also sounded like an opening salvo in the battle to define Trumpism.

The defenders of Messrs. Carlson and Fuentes included Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, widely viewed as Mr. Trump’s brain trust.

 

Kevin Roberts

Mr. Roberts insisted that Christians should be free to criticise Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism, a fair proposition, but then descended into anti-Semitic tropes by accusing the “globalist class” of seeking to silence Christian critics whose “loyalty” is to “Christ first, and to America always.”

In a similar vein, Vice President JD Vance last week sidestepped the issue of anti-Semitism while answering a student’s question about US support for Israel that was laced with anti-Jewish connotations.

In a twist of irony, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Anti-Semitism, Amichai Chikli, the son of a conservative rabbi, who serves as Israel’s de facto ambassador to the global far right, many of whom have anti-Semitic antecedents, facilitated the mainstreaming of the likes of Mr. Fuentes.

Mr Netanyahu has long honoured men like US televangelist John Hagee, chairman of Christians United for Israel, who have histories of anti-Semitism.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu thanks United Christians for Israel

Mr. Chikli, supported by lawmakers Amit Halevi and Ohad Tal, Simcha Rothman, the architect of Mr. Netanyahu’s controversial judicial reform, and Innovation, Science and Technology Minister Gila Gamliel, has spent much of his tenure cozying up to the global far right rather than meeting with Jewish communities worldwide.

Mr. Chikli’s engagements included influential Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meetings in Maryland and Hungary alongside Holocaust deniers, self-identified Nazis, and Christian nationalists.

In Budapest, Mr. Chikli last year shared the stage with Tom van Grieken, the head of Belgium's Vlaams Belang, a party with long-standing ties to both European neo-Nazis and Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party.

Mr. Chikli also engaged with far-right Spanish party Vox who until last year was too toxic even for Mr. Netanyahu, Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanic, a onetime proponent of the Great Replacement Theory and candidate for New York governor, Sweden Democrats, the second-largest party in the Scandinavian nation’s parliament, that has neo-Nazi and antisemitic roots, and France’s National Rally, formerly the National Front, founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who called the Nazi gas chambers a "detail" of World War Two history.

Mr. Le Pen’s daughter, Marine Le Pen, has sought to distance the party from her father’s anti-Semitism.

Earlier this year, Messrs. Netanyahu and Chikli crowned their efforts to whitewash the global far right and sideline reform and more liberal strands of Judaism by inviting for the first time some of the far right’s most prominent representatives to an Israeli government-sponsored conference in Jerusalem on combatting anti-Semitism.

The invitation prompted prominent, staunchly pro-Israel Jewish activists and German officials tasked with countering anti-Semitism to boycott or downgrade their participation in the conference.

Notwithstanding Israel’s efforts to regain ground among Mr. Trump’s Evangelical and Make America Great Again support base, Mr. Ye’s epiphany may be an opportunistic blip on the radar rather than a turning of the tide.

Mr. Ye’s “apology…is a mockery of repentance,” said Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, viewed as one of America’s most prominent Jewish religious figures.

“The Torah demands teshuvah gemurah—complete repentance. That means returning what was stolen, repairing what was broken, healing what was harmed. Kanye has done none of that. His music remains online. His statements remain uncorrected. His followers, many of whom gleefully repost antisemitic tropes, have not been told by their idol to stand down,” Mr. Boteach added.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.