Kyrie Irving's non-apology is as empty and incoherent as that stupid movie
Drew Magary watched all 3-plus hours of the movie so you don't have to
Kyrie Irving issued a vague statement Wednesday night.
It’s not quite accurate to say there’s been a resurgence in antisemitism here in America lately, as if this country — and the world in general — only occasionally dabbles in that specific practice. Antisemitism has always been here and likely always will be, and so the only variance is in whether or not you happen to NOTICE antisemitism at any distinct point in our national hatred continuum. Well, thanks to Brooklyn Nets point guard Kyrie Irving, among many, many others, you and I are noticing a whole lot more antisemitism at the moment than we’re perhaps usually accustomed to.
In the case of Kyrie, his trouble — and do I ever use that word generously — started when he posted this since-deleted tweet, and a matching Instagram story, promoting the 2018 documentary “Hebrews To Negroes: Wake Up Black America”:
The since-deleted tweet.
That tweet kicked up an uproar that did not culminate in Kyrie’s release. Not even a suspension. Instead, the Nets fired coach Steve Nash, gave Irving a light chastisement from owner Joe Tsai, and issued a statement with Irving on Wednesday night that promised a million dollars toward “causes and organizations” (they do not clarify which ones) to “promote education within our community.” If that language isn’t quite bland enough for you, well then have a look at Kyrie’s own words, which don’t even include a cursory “sorry if I offended anyone” in them.
Irving’s non-apology claimed Wednesday that “I do not believe everything said in the documentary was true or reflects my morals and principles.”
Well, I watched the whole thing, and pretty much everything said in it is pure, uncut antisemitism. Irving probably didn’t watch it, which makes his promotion of this “documentary” all the more damning: ignorance on top of ignorance. At the end of last night’s statement, Kyrie claims he wishes “to only be a beacon of truth and light.” Well I’m gonna follow his example and tell you exactly what’s in this movie, why it’s horrible on its face, and why Kyrie and the Nets are still an absolute disgrace.
First of all, it’s worth noting that “H2N” is still available on Amazon, so you can watch this masterpiece if you so choose. I recommend you don’t. With a title like “Hebrews To Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” you just know that this is the kind of documentary that features a lot of exclamation points. “H2N” also features a moment of Holocaust denial that is so distressingly blatant that it nearly reduces everything else in it to a supporting point. The only time this movie is coherent during its interminable three-and-a-half-hour running time (!!!) is when it’s being openly hateful. At all other times, it feels like any standard truthering gibberish that you can watch on YouTube. If Kyrie watched this movie, and I’d bet you my salary he didn’t, the only parts he COULD have noticed, and therefore liked, are the same parts he has only vaguely denounced.
“H2N” was produced, directed, written, and narrated by a Black man named Ronald Dalton, who uses the first half hour to tease the movie itself and to plug a series of books and URLs, one of which is now busted. I kept waiting for the documentary part of this documentary to begin, but it never did. No one is interviewed in “H2N,” save for Dalton’s cameraman. Half the images you see on screen are Bible passages and the other half are stock photos, with everything loosely tied together by arbitrary chapter headings and teaser graphics like WHO WERE THE HORITES?! Some of these on-screen titles are out of alignment. If you like 500 different fonts all being used simultaneously, bits of text that have been highlighted in red seemingly at random, and bold proclamations like “The greatest Hebrew collaboration ever!” slapped across your screen, then this is your kind of movie, if it can be called a movie at all.
Given all that, it can be easy to laugh off both “H2N” and Kyrie for being dumb enough to signal-boost it. Its lack of coherence and slipshod production values almost act as a distraction from the core ugliness contained therein. But this is a fundamentally antisemitic work built around the belief that Black people are the original Hebrews, and that present-day Jews have stolen their identity and used it to run the world. This is a bedrock principle within certain elements of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement; it’s been extensively debunked and is indisputably hateful, no matter how childish a guise it may come in. If this is what Kyrie was referring to when he told the press, “History is not supposed to be hidden from anybody,” he at least could have chosen a better, even factual, example of it.
There is no light to be found here, nor any truth, nor even any real inquisitiveness. Dalton, who narrates the movie like he’s simultaneously playing “Call of Duty,” has no use for questioning his own central thesis. He’s here to give you the REAL story, which, in the words of his own narration, is this:
“Black people are now finding out that they are the real lost children of Israel. In turn, they are realizing that the Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Israeli Jews are just religious converts with no biblical connection to the ancient 12 tribes of Israel.”
To support his claim, Dalton cites passages from Deuteronomy, displays endlessly scrolling lists of Hebrew words that resemble words in other languages, DNA pie charts, ancient circumcision rituals and MORE passages from Deuteronomy. There can be no other trustworthy sources because, as Dalton tells the audience, “the mass media is the biggest tool of indoctrination, brainwashing, and propaganda that the world has ever seen. For centuries, it has been helping Satan deceive the world, including the Christian church. Don’t believe me?”
I do not, but Dalton then cuts to a quote from infamous antisemite and maker of average cars Henry Ford that claims that the Jews are “controlling the world’s sources of news” so that they might mold the minds of “whole nations” to suit their nefarious purposes. And if you need your bigotry even more pronounced than that, well then let me repeat the “five falsehoods” that were established, according to Dalton, by the Jews, “to conceal their nature and protect their status and power”:
"1. The Jews are 'Israelites,' and thus God’s chosen people
"2. Jesus Christ was a Jew
"3. That 6 million Jews were killed in a holocaust during WWII
"4. That all races are equal, or that all are brothers
"5. That the Jews are just another religious group"
That brief slideshow was the smoking gun that got everyone worked up about “H2N,” and about Kyrie’s endorsement of it. This open Holocaust denial comes roughly 30 minutes into the picture and then is NEVER addressed again, because Dalton is far too busy trying to prove that Black people are the true right holders of the Holy Land.
Here is where context matters, because Kyrie has vocally, and rightly, given his support to Palestine, and because there’s no group of people on Earth who deserve to indulge in truthering MORE than Black people, given that there have been, and currently are, so many ACTUAL conspiracies plotted against them. These are conspiracies that can’t even be categorized using that word because they’ve been plotted out and executed so openly throughout world history: slavery, segregation, apartheid, redlining, disenfranchisement, genocide, mass imprisonment, and on and on. These are institutionalized evils, so how can any Black person discount any out-there theory when so many of them are deeply rooted in truth?
Furthermore, Dalton’s movie asks a few necessary questions, such as: What is the heritage of Black people worldwide, and how has that heritage been erased from history? All Black people — all humans, really — can and should ask themselves these things. You can even pick a college major that explores them fully if you like. You’d learn an awful lot, and you’d be a better person upon receiving your diploma.
Or, I guess, you can watch this movie, which bypasses actual scholarship in favor of citing Hitler — despite the typo below, it’s very much THAT Hitler — as one of its most reliable sources.
You don’t get to pretend that endorsing this kind of movie was an innocent mistake, particularly when it unspools like a 3.5-hour version of the Instagram infographics and Alex Jones after-school specials that Irving already is so fond of sharing. Irving has long staked his online persona on being a third-eye-open kind of jackass. So when he vociferously defended his right to s—tpost to the media in the initial wake of this scandal, it’s not because he loves the film in question (which, to be clear here, is a piece of s—t), but because he loves being the smartest fella in the room, upsetting all the sheeple with truths that they aren’t ready to hear.
In that way, his statement Wednesday night was entirely true to his character, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. If he truly wanted to set an example for the world, as he seems eager to do, he would have apologized, specifically rebutted all of the instances of hate speech within Dalton’s film, and promoted works that not only decry antisemitism, but explain its origins and motives. He did none of those things, because that would have made him a normal person instead of a Guy Who Has Beliefs. Ultimately, Irving doesn’t care that this movie is antisemitic, racist trash. He only cares that you’re mad about it. He can play coy and tell the media, “I’m not here to complain about it. I just exist,” positing himself as a passive actor in this whole affair rather than a prominent disseminator of horribly made propaganda.
But a disseminator is exactly what he is, and he does no favors to Jews nor to Black people when he spreads unvarnished hate speech, and when that hate speech grows long tentacles thanks to his endorsement. He’s not sorry, and both he and the Nets think a pitiful million dollars is enough to wipe the slate clean. It’s not. It’s pathetic, is what it is. I know what movie I saw.
“After watching this film,” Dalton says at the end of “H2N,” “we should now know who is running the world.” And I do. But I already did, and I already know the people running the world are not the people Dalton thinks are. I also know that they’re more than happy for Dalton to make s—t like this and for the masses to buy into it.
So no, I do not feel enlightened watching Kyrie’s dickhead Nazi movie. I don’t think he’s learned his lesson. I don’t think he takes any responsibility of any kind. I don’t feel GOOD about what Kyrie has done. Instead, I feel like I just got a large enough dose of idiocy to be immunized against it. Vaccinated, you might say.
1 comment:
That's what you guys get for starting up the NAACP.
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