Nicki Minaj isn’t gaining any new fans from her latest music video.
The Anti Defamation League is “deeply disturbed by the unadulterated Nazi imagery” featured in the lyric music video (above) for single “Only.”
The animated video for the song featuring Drake, Lil Wayne and Chris Brown, sets up Minaj as the leader of an army that looks a lot like Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, except the initials of her Young Money record label stand in for a swastika.
The ADL’s national director Abraham H. Foxman, who is also a Holocaust survivor, scolded Minaj and her entire team for the “insensitive” video released last Friday.
“Nicki Minaj’s new video disturbingly evokes Third Reich propaganda and constitutes a new low for pop culture’s exploitation of Nazi symbolism,” Foxman said. “The irony should be lost on no one that this video debuted on the 76th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the ‘night of broken glass’ pogrom that signaled the beginning of the Final Solution and the Holocaust.”
“It is troubling that no one among Minaj’s group of producers, publicists and managers raised a red flag about the use of such imagery before ushering the video into public release,” Foxman continued. “This video is insensitive to Holocaust survivors and a trivialization of the history of that era. The abuse of Nazi imagery is deeply disturbing and offensive to Jews and all those who can recall the sacrifices Americans and many others had to make as a result of Hitler’s Nazi juggernaut.”