Western Europe’s rap scene has an anti-Semitism problem

CNAAN LIPHSHIZ

Kholardi, a popular Norwegian rapper of Iranian descent, wished his fellow Muslims “Eid Mubarak”, a greeting in Arabic for the Eid al-Fitr holiday that marked the end of Ramadan.

He asked whether there were any Christians present, smiling upon hearing cheers. Then, he asked if there were any Jews.

“F***ing Jews,” he said after a short silence, adding “Just kidding.”

In Norway, the incident generated an uproar, and again last month, when the Scandinavian country’s attorney general cleared the 24-year-old musician of hate-speech charges, opining that his slur may have been directed at Israel.

It was a tenuous interpretation considering how Kholardi never mentioned the Jewish state on stage, and five days earlier tweeted, “F***ing Jews are so corrupt.”

From a broader European perspective, the incident demonstrates how the continent’s rap scene has become a haven and major avenue for the kinds of hate speech that governments are increasingly determined to curb online and on the street.

That’s a problem because “rap is a catastrophic vector, propagating anti-Semitism to the population most susceptible to it”, Philipp Schmidt, the vice-president of France’s International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism, or LICRA, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

In France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and elsewhere, rappers have dabbled in Holocaust denial, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, grotesque Holocaust analogies, and threats against “Zionists”.

As a subculture with distinctly anti-establishment characteristics, the European rap scene has helped lift taboos on anti-Semitic rhetoric while escaping the scrutiny applied to hate speech in mainstream forums, said Joel Rubinfeld, the president of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism, or LBCA.

Denigrating rhetoric, including about Jews, is common in the rap scene worldwide, including in its native United States, Rubinfeld said.

But whereas rap anti-Semitism in the US tends to revolve around classic stereotypes about Jewish money and power, in Europe it has been augmented by “the utilisation of the Arab-Israeli conflict to inflame internal conflict”, Rubinfeld said.

This corresponds to how “rap’s base in the United States is black, and in Europe it’s Muslims from poor suburbs, where anti-Semitism is rife”.

Ben Salomo, a German-Jewish rapper, noted the trend in an interview with the Arte television channel in 2017. The Palestinian issue is gaining traction in Germany’s rap scene, he said, along with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Approaching the Israeli-Arab conflict “legitimises in their mind hate speech against Jews”, Salomo said of some of his fellow rappers.

But the problem goes deeper than the rap scene itself.

“Rap reflects society. If this rhetoric didn’t correspond to what people really think, rappers wouldn’t say it because they are above all demagogues and populists writing about popular themes to sell albums,” Salomo said.

Unlike in the US, Rubinfeld said, rap in Europe is becoming an intersection point for the far right, far left, and Muslim anti-Semites.

In parallel to the so-called new anti-Semitism, in which Jews are targeted over Israel, the European rap scene is rich with Holocaust jokes and classic Jew hatred.

Last year’s Echo Awards ceremony – the German equivalent of the Grammys – was mired in controversy when the rap duo Kollegah and Farid Bang were honoured for an album featuring a joke about their bodies being more “sculpted than an Auschwitz prisoner’s” among other Holocaust references.

Some activists against racism have started working with European rap artists precisely because of the scene’s anti-Semitism problem.

“There’s no other music being consumed in vulnerable neighbourhoods,” said Serfaty, the rabbi from France. “It needs to be a tool for introducing content in favour of tolerance, in favour of France.

 “There is beautiful poetry and messages of unity in the genre,” Serfati said. “We need to encourage it, help it grow, not overnight but over time.”