The Devil Wears Antisemitism.
Prada’s new spokesperson is Marwan Abdelhamid, known professionally as Saint Levant.
Born in Jerusalem during the second Intifada to a French-Algerian mother and a Serbian-Palestinian father, Abdelhamid spent seven years growing up in Gaza.
The rapper wears a Palestinian pendant in his photos. The pendant features the geographical map of Palestine, omitting Israel from the region. He caused a stir this week by wearing the pendant in a new video.
According to many reports, “Saint Levant” — who lives in Los Angeles — enraged Jews when he praised violent antisemitic attacks targeting Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam. He was repping YSL aka Yves Saint Laurent at the time. Saint Levant was performing in the Dutch city. The 2024 attacks had been described as a “pogrom” targeting Jews.
Saint Levant reportedly told his fans: “Quick little shoutout to our Moroccan brothers for what they did the other day,” he told the crowd. “Because it’s not the first time that they come to a land that’s not theirs and start some shit. So thank you for taking care of business.”
Abdelhamid once told Harper’s Bazaar: “Everything that I do is Israeli-focused and based on the Palestinian cause and struggle, doing a lot of contextualizing […] because I came to America, man, and I realized that a lot of people thought that […] it’s a conflict between these two equal[s who] just hate each other for some reason, [that] Palestinians just hate Israelis. And what people don’t understand is that it’s 80 years of occupation and oppression and displacement and ethnic cleansing so I think it’s very important to just push that forward always and I try to do it through the music; I try to do it through my actions, and everything that I do.”
Royatvnews reported: “The artist has consistently described ‘Israel’s existence in Palestinian territories as an occupation, frequently speaking out against decades of oppression and displacement. Amid the ongoing war in Gaza, Abdelhamid has publicly accused ‘Israel’ of committing genocide, a stance that has made him a deeply polarizing figure globally, while cementing his status as a prominent cultural voice for Palestinian solidarity.”
Maybe Prada simply doesn’t care about Jewish customers. But this is yet another continuation of the normalizing of antisemitism by corporations.
