This is not a column about Kanye West

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The most distressing thing about Kanye West’s recent antisemitic outburst was not what the rapper said. It was the response.

The justification, rationalization, excuses. The defence. The eruption of finger-pointing. The antisemitism-splaining from people who do not know what it feels like to be its target.

Over the weekend, the hip hop artist now known as Ye posted on Instagram that rapper and record executive Sean “Diddy” Combs was controlled by Jews. And then on Twitter, Ye wrote that he was going to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” His Twitter and Instagram accounts were locked, but not before that tweet received more than 42,000 likes.

What happened next is the interesting part.

Some tried to explain the antisemitism by pointing to Ye’s bipolar disorder. Mental illness presents differently in different people, but it does not make racism acceptable. Most people who suffer from mental illness do not post antisemitic garbage on Twitter.

But antisemitism has been normalized. How else can you explain that after all this – and the revelation of Ye’s further antisemitic ramblings in an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, which had been carefully edited out – an official Republican Twitter account did not delete this (already icky) tweet: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”

Conservative author and pundit Candace Owens – who recently joined Ye in wearing shirts emblazoned with “White Lives Matter,” which the Anti-Defamation League calls a white-supremacist hate slogan – said: “if you are an honest person, you did not think this tweet was antisemitic.” Also, this: “It’s like you cannot even say the word ‘Jewish’ without people getting upset.”

Ye’s tweet gave voice once again to an ancient and dangerous antisemitic trope, used by, yes, the Nazis: Conspiracy theories about shadowy secret cabals of Jews controlling the world (or at least the media). Today, a coded way of expressing anti-Semitism is to call Jews “globalists” (as in Jews are loyal to each other as a group across the globe and not to their individual countries).

In the fallout, it was claimed that when people tweet other racist things, the world doesn’t erupt – but if someone says something against the Jews, watch out. Specific to Ye, people noted that the rapper had been saying all kinds of horrible stuff for a long time (true), but it was only when he targeted the Jews that he was silenced.

The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg wrote about what he called an ”agonizing catch-22″ for Jews when confronted with such prejudice: “If they say nothing, the hatred spreads unchecked. If they say something, and it results in consequences for the anti-Semite, the bigot just uses that as evidence for their anti-Semitic worldview.”

There was once a point – in particular, when the horrors of the Holocaust became well-known – when it felt like anti-Semitism had become, at the very least, socially unacceptable.

We are no longer there.

“It’s tough these days not to sense an encroaching darkness,” writes Dara Horn in her book People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present.

“I had mistaken the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews,” the U.S. author wrote in the introduction. “I was very wrong.”

One of the smartest people on the topic of contemporary anti-Semitism is the British writer David Baddiel, author of Jews Don’t Count, which explores how anti-Semitism has fallen through the cracks of modern identity politics and anti-racism campaigns, and how Jewish people often lack the allies that other marginalized groups can rely on. “Kanye West’s threat to Jews,” he argued on Twitter, “is as ever based on a myth of Jewish power, a myth believed across the political spectrum ... [that] Jews are powerful so attacking them is punching up and concern for them in the face of it unnecessary.”

There was a feeling, voiced by the comedian Sarah Silverman in response to Ye’s tweet, that allies were silent. Her observation further fuelled the social media war. Groups who are and should be allies when it comes to fighting racism and social injustice wound up at each other’s virtual throats. It was ugly and at cross-purposes.

I can picture the real racists and anti-Semites watching this all go down, having a laugh – all the way to the ballot box, perhaps.

I happened to be in Winnipeg when much of this took place. It was hard not to think about it as I wandered the halls of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the section on the Holocaust in particular.

“Anti-Semitism is a destructive set of beliefs that regards Jews as both inferior and threatening to non-Jews. It existed long before the Holocaust and persists to this day,” one of the wall plaques stated.

I was particularly struck by this quote from Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel: “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”