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‘I like Hitler,’ Kanye West repeatedly tells Alex Jones during 3-hour ‘InfoWars’ appearance
(JTA) – The far-right streaming host Alex Jones tried to throw his guest Kanye West a lifeline Thursday after weeks of the rapper’s public antisemitic behavior.
“You’re not Hitler. You’re not a Nazi,” Jones prodded West, who now goes by Ye, on his show “InfoWars,” a haven for right-wing conspiracy theories.
But Ye, or a man who sounded like Ye under a skintight all-black mask that completely covered his face, wanted to set the record straight.
“I see good things about Hitler, also,” he told Jones. “I like Hitler. … Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table. Especially Hitler.”
It was yet another shocking outburst from the former billionaire who dominated popular culture for decades before veering hard into antisemitism and extremist conspiracy theories. Ye’s declaration last month that he was going “death con 3 on Jewish people” and subsequent doubling down on further antisemitic behavior cost him billions of dollars in sponsorships, led to most of his friends and colleagues publicly distancing themselves from him and inspired antisemites across the country who have made “Kanye is right” a rallying cry.
And yet the rapper continues to have friends in high places, as evidenced by his reinstatement on Twitter at the hands of the world’s richest man Elon Musk and his dinner last week with former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, to which he had brought as a guest the antisemite, Charlottesville march organizer and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
The rapper’s visit to Jones’ studio with Fuentes was the latest stop on his media tour of right-wing fringe figures since being deplatformed by his major sponsors and allies. He also stopped by YouTuber Tim Pool’s show this week, with Fuentes and fellow alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos by his side, but stormed out when Pool challenged him on his antisemitism.
Jones, who also has a longstanding connection to Trump, is no stranger to trafficking in odious conspiracy theories, having recently been ordered by a jury to pay $1 billion to victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting after claiming on his program that it was a hoax. He has also embraced antisemitism to a degree, telling Ye on Thursday, “I agree there’s a Jewish mafia.”
But his strategy for Ye’s appearance was to try to mitigate and redirect public criticism of his guest, giving him multiple opportunities to disavow his praise for Nazis. “I dont think the story should be about antisemitism or Nazis or anything,” Jones said at one point — but was interrupted by Ye, who said, “I like Nazis, though.”
Later, Jones described the horrors of the Nazi death camps, as described to him by someone he knew who, he said, participated in their liberation as a U.S. soldier. “I don’t like Hitler. He was terrible,” Jones said. Ye immediately countered: “I like Hitler!” Jones offered yet another lifeline: “I know you’re trying to be shocking.”
“I’m not trying to be shocking. I like Hitler,” Ye said, adding, “Hitler had a lot of redeeming qualities.”
Ye’s fascination with Hitler is longstanding, according to the accounts of people who worked with him and who have spoken up about his past comments since he launched his antisemitic spree. But on Jones’ show, he emphasized that he loves everyone, including Jews, Zionists, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
Trump, who is also running for president in 2024, has faced intense criticism — including from many of his Republican Jewish allies — over his dinner with Ye and Fuentes. One of those who criticized him was the incoming Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. On Jones’ show Ye offered a kind of Netanyahu impersonation, pulling out a small orange net and pretending to speak as the Israeli leader in a falsetto voice. “I just heard about this guy two weeks ago,” he said.
Kanye is currently doing prop comedy about Benjamin Netanyahu & praising hitler on InfoWars alongside a conspiracy theorist & white supremacist pic.twitter.com/dFRBMTHAsR
— Brennan Murphy (@brenonade) December 1, 2022
Toward the end of the livestream, which lasted well over three hours, Jones welcomed a call from Laura Loomer, the Jewish far-right activist and onetime congressional candidate who is waging a campaign to get her account reinstated on Twitter. She said she had been asked how she, a Jewish woman, could support Ye, and explained, “This is more than just somebody being Jewish, somebody being Christian. This is about the truth and fighting for free speech.” (“Love you,” Ye responded.)
The Republican Jewish Coalition, which had initially condemned the Trump-Ye-Fuentes dinner without mentioning Trump by name but later clarified it was referring to “all Republicans,” said in a statement that the rapper’s “InfoWars” appearance “was a horrific cesspool of dangerous, bigoted Jew hatred” and added, “Conservatives who have mistakenly indulged Kanye West must make it clear that he is a pariah. Enough is enough.”
Ye had one final trick up his sleeve: In response to Musk reinstating him on Twitter, he said he would be handing over his account to Jones and Fuentes, as Musk has previously said he would draw the line at bringing back Jones’ account. Tweets purportedly authored by Jones and Fuentes then began appearing in Ye’s account.
Ye also had a successful year on the Billboard charts in spite of everything, with the album sales tracker noting Thursday that he was the year’s “Top Gospel Artist” and “Top Christian Artist,” and that his 2021 album “Donda” was 2022’s top gospel album.
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The post UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
The post Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’ appeared first on The Forward.