Antisemitic rapper Wiley performs at freshers’ event in Preston despite protest from students’ union

It was reported that the antisemitic rapper Wiley performed at a freshers’ event in Preston on Saturday despite protest from the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) Students’ Union beforehand.

On 24th July 2020, the rapper Richard Kylea Cowie, who is known as Wiley, spent days engaged in an escalating rant on social media against Jews. After likening Jews to the Ku Klux Klan and claiming that Jews had cheated him and were “snakes”, Wiley tweeted that Jews should “hold some corn”, a slang expression meaning that they should be shot. He added: “Jewish community you deserve it”. He then also called on “black people” to go to “war” with Jews.

Wiley repeatedly evoked conspiracy theories that Jews were responsible for the slave trade and that modern-day Jews are in fact imposters who usurped black people — a conspiracy theory that has incited acts of terrorism against Jews, such as a shooting in Jersey City and a stabbing attack in Monsey, NY during the festival of Chanukah last December.

In the days that followed, Wiley continued to rail against Jews on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Following discussions with Campaign Against Antisemitism, a major 48-hour boycott of Twitter and Instagram in which we participated, and our projection of antisemitic tweets onto Twitter’s London headquarters, which then went viral, Twitter, Facebook (which owns Instagram), Google (which owns YouTube) and TikTok agreed to remove Wiley from their platforms, depriving him of access to his nearly one million social media followers.

On Friday, it emerged that UCLan Students’ Union released a statement condemning the news of Wiley’s scheduled performance at Preston’s Switch nightclub. The statement read: “UCLan Students’ Union sometimes signposts students to external events being run across the city, but we are always clear that these events are external to us and are not run by us. We are also able to confirm that this Switch club night was not one of these events. We condemn all forms of antisemitism and given the previous actions of Wiley, which include a series of antisemitic social media posts, we strongly encourage Switch to cancel this event and reconsider any further ties with Wiley and his management.”

The University adopted the International Definition of Antisemitism last November.

However, despite the students’ wishes, Switch persisted in hosting the rapper and has since uploaded a series of photos and videos of his performance to its Facebook page.

Campaign Against Antisemitism is continuing its response to Wiley’s antisemitic tirade, including:

• Filing our criminal complaint against Wiley in the Netherlands;
• Continuing to meet with executives from Twitter, Facebook and Google to address their response to antisemitism on their platforms;
• Working with the Cabinet Office’s Honours Forfeiture Committee to ensure that Wiley’s MBE is revoked;
• Seeking a change in policy so that racists are automatically stripped of their honours in future;
• Urging the Government to bring forward legislation to regulate social networks and force them to remove racist incitement which has recently borne fruit; and
• Working with the music industry to remove Wiley’s awards and ensure that he is shunned for his racism.