Campaigner Stephen Jackson says DeSean Jackson 'speaking truth' with Hitler quote
Former NBA player and activist Stephen Jackson has said Philadelphia Eagles receiver DeSean Jackson was “speaking the truth” when he twice posted a quote falsely attributed to Adolf Hitler that says white Jews “will blackmail America. [They] will extort America, their plan for world domination won’t work if the Negroes know who they were.”
DeSean Jackson subsequently apologized for the posts, and also for showing support for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who holds antisemitic views.
“So I just read a statement that the Philadelphia Eagles posted regarding DeSean Jackson’s comments. He was trying to educate himself, educate people, and he’s speaking the truth. Right? He’s speaking the truth. You know he don’t hate nobody, but he’s speaking the truth of the facts that he knows and trying to educate others,” Stephen Jackson said in a video posted on Instagram.
“But y’all don’t want us to educate ourselves. If it’s talking about the Black race, y’all ain’t saying nothing about it.
They killing us, police killing us and treating us like shit, racism at an alltime high, but ain’t none of you NFL owners spoke up on that, ain’t none of you teams spoke up on that. But the same team had a receiver [Riley Cooper] who said the [n-word] publicly! They gave him an extension! I play for the Big3. We have a Jewish owner. He understands where we stand and some of the things we say, but it’s not directed to him. It’s the way we’ve been treated.”
DeSean Jackson’s quote is based on a disproven story that Hitler wanted to start a world war to stop Jews in America from oppressing black people. It also promotes the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews secretly control the world, a common trope among the far-right.
Stephen Jackson, who played 14 years in the NBA and was a starter on the San Antonio Spurs’ championship team in 2003, was a close friend of George Floyd, the black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May. Since Floyd’s death, he has become a prominent voice in the antiracism protests that have swept the US. The 42-year-old later deleted the Instagram video before posting a message that read: “Your races pain doesn’t hurt more than the next races pain”.
Riley Cooper, the white wide receiver mentioned in Stephen Jackson’s post, used the n-word at a Kenny Chesney concert in 2013 in an incident that was captured on video. He was given a five-year contract extension the following year.
DeSean Jackson posted an apology on Instagram on Tuesday night, and
the Eagles called his initial comments “appalling”. The team’s owner, Jeffrey Lurie, is Jewish.
“My post was definitely not intended for anybody of any race to feel any type of way, especially the Jewish community,” DeSean Jackson said in the video. “I post things on my story all the time, and just probably never should have posted anything Hitler did, because Hitler was a bad person, and I know that.”