Candace Owens, who had faced criticism for not offering a condemnation of Kanye West’s antisemitic comments, finally addressed the issue on Tuesday, describing statements by the rapper, who she is friends with, as antisemitic, according to JNS.
On the latest episode of her “Candace Owens” podcast, Owens said about remarks by West, who goes by the name Ye: “He hurt a lot of people. And he owned that.”
“And yet, for Ye, in a really bizarre way, he intentionally blew himself up – because he has been under so much pressure in Hollywood to be somebody he’s not. He has since shared that what started all of this was a series of text messages from one Jewish person. And it’s important to say one Jewish person – not the Jewish community, not the entire Jewish world,” she said.
Writing in the Daily Wire under the headline, “Breaking My Silence On Ye And The Jewish Community,” Owens was clear that while she was supporting her friend Ye, she was also in solidarity with the Jewish community, including Dennis Prager whose Prager University she worked at for two years.
“I’m standing by Ye as he weathers this tremendous storm. But I also recognize that I need to make it abundantly clear that I’m standing by Dennis Prager as well, and all of my other Jewish friends and supporters who are speaking out for me, and who have endured what may have felt like a very heavy silence from me,” she wrote.
“I think it’s important for me to state the obvious: I, of course, am not antisemitic whatsoever,” Owens said. “I’ve never had an antisemitic bone in my body. Actually, before I married my husband, I almost married a Jewish man.”
In early October, on an episode of her podcast, Owens had originally defended West, denying the rapper was antisemitic and accusing the media of targeting West over his political views.
At the time, Owens said West’s social media posts were bizarre, but not antisemitic.
“If you are an honest person, you did not think this tweet was antisemitic. You did not think that he wrote this tweet because he hates or wants to genocide [sic] the Jewish people],” she said.
"If you were an honest person, when you read this tweet, you had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I had no idea, when I read this tweet, what the hell he was talking about. This tweet inspired questions, not answers."
“What is ‘death con 3’? Did he mean ‘DEFCON 3,’ which would be a military defense position?”
“If you’re a liar, you’ll say, ‘I was scared Candace, I actually thought that Kanye West was going to launch a military strike on Israel’.”
“That was the reaction that was met with this tweet.”
During that episode, Owens also pushed back on accusations that West’s recent comments regarding Jared Kushner and his brother Josh, made on Fox News during an interview with Tucker Carlson, were antisemitic