Kanye West offers to meet UK’s Jewish community after Wireless backlash

The rapper formerly known as Kanye West has broken his silence and offered to “meet and listen” to members of the UK’s Jewish Community after a fierce backlash over his booking at London’s Wireless Festival.West, who is legally known as Ye, has been criticised for making antisemitic remarks, including voicing admiration for Adolf Hitler. Last year he released a song called Heil Hitler a few months after advertising a swastika T-shirt for sale on his website.His planned appearance has been condemned by MPs and Jewish organisations, who have urged the government to ban him from the country. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, said the rapper should not be headlining the festival.On Tuesday, Ye released a statement addressing the furore, in which he offered to meet the UK’s Jewish Community. In January, Ye took out a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal apologising for his antisemitic behaviour and attributing his inflammatory actions to his bipolar-1 disorder.The statement said: “I’ve been following the conversation around Wireless and want to address it directly.“My only goal is to come to London and present a show of change, bringing unity, peace and love through my music.“I would be grateful for the opportunity to meet with members of the Jewish Community in the UK in person, to listen. I know words aren’t enough – I’ll have to show change through my actions. If you’re open, I’m here.”Phil Rosenberg, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the largest and Jewish communal organisation in the UK, said the body was “willing” to meet Ye, but only if he agreed not to play the festival.“Even while claiming remorse today, his latest album includes a track first released last year with the abhorrent title Gas Chamber,” Rosenberg said. “The Jewish Community will want to see a genuine remorse and change before believing that the appropriate place to test this sincerity is on the main stage at the Wireless Festival.“As such, we are willing to meet Kanye West as part of his journey of healing, but only after he agrees not to play the Wireless Festival this year.”Kanye West has offered ‘to meet with members of the Jewish Community in the UK in person, to listen’. Photograph: Scott Dudelson/Getty ImagesOver the weekend, Keir Starmer said it was “deeply concerning” that Ye had been booked to perform “despite his previous antisemitic remarks and celebration of nazism”.On Monday evening, Melvin Benn, the managing director of Festival Republic, which promotes Wireless, said Ye was “intended to come in and perform”, adding that they were “not giving him a platform to extol opinion of whatever nature, only to perform the songs that are currently played on the radio stations in our country and the streaming platforms in our country and listened to and enjoyed by millions”.He added: “I am a deeply committed anti-fascist and have been all my adult life. I lived on a kibbutz for many months in the 1970s that was attacked on 7 October [2023], am pro-Jew and the Jewish state, while being equally committed to a Palestinian state.“What Ye has said in the past about Jews and Hitler is as abhorrent to me as it is to the Jewish Community, the prime minister and others that have commented and – taking him at his word – to Ye now also.”Benn called for Ye to be given a second chance.“Having had a person in my life for the last 15 years who suffers from mental illness, I have witnessed many episodes of despicable behaviour that I have had to forgive and move on from. If I wasn’t before, I have become a person of forgiveness and hope in all aspects of my life, including work.“Forgiveness and giving people a second chance are becoming a lost virtue in this ever-increasing divisive world and I would ask people to reflect on their instant comments of disgust at the likelihood of him performing (as was mine) and offer some forgiveness and hope to him as I have decided to do.”Pepsi and Diageo withdrew their sponsorship of the festival after Ye was announced as the headline act, and no brands appeared as visible sponsors on Wireless’s official website on Monday evening.However, on Tuesday, speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Benn claimed Pepsi had signed off on Ye as the headliner.“They signed off and approved it,” Benn said. “They’re our headline sponsor, we asked them to sign off on it and they did.”Benn admitted the festival could have approached the Jewish Community earlier and that not doing so until recently might “prove to be a mistake”.On Tuesday morning, Streeting did not accept the argument.“When Kanye West uses bipolar disorder to justify his actions, I think that is equally appalling, by the way,” he said. “I would ask people to consider, does using bipolar disorder as an excuse to write and release a song called Heil Hitler and plaster it across T-shirts, does bipolar disorder really justify that? Or is it an excuse to justify rotten behaviour?”