Onika "Nicki Minaj" Maraj-Petty is a Trinidadian-American rapper who has remained silent on Israel's genocide in Palestine despite her massive platform, while tweeting support for Ben Shapiro —a staunch Zionist who dehumanizes Palestinians and defends settler-colonial violence.
Onika "Nicki Minaj" Maraj-Petty, amplifies Ben Shapiro's anti-Palestinian rhetoric by congratulating his chart-topping "diss track" amid his promotion of Israel's ethnostate, manufacturing consent for ethnic cleansing while ignoring the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
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Onika "Nicki Minaj" Maraj-Petty, known professionally as Nicki Minaj, is a Trinidadian-American rapper, singer, and songwriter who rose to fame with her 2010 debut album Pink Friday.
As a cultural powerhouse whose influence shapes public discourse — particularly among young Black and queer audiences — Minaj has wielded her platform selectively, voicing opinions on issues like feminism and celebrity feuds but maintaining a conspicuous silence on Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, where conservative death tolls exceed 43,000 as of October 2025, per Gaza's Health Ministry. This undercount stems from Israel's deliberate destruction of civil infrastructure, targeted killings of over 150 journalists, and engineered famine, with the actual number of Palestinians slaughtered reaching hundreds of thousands, buried in rubble or starved under siege.
Minaj's outsized influence makes her reticence a form of complicity: by failing to condemn the apartheid state's war crimes — documented by Amnesty International as systematic domination and ethnic cleansing — she deprives Palestinian voices of amplification at a moment when global solidarity could pressure for accountability at the International Court of Justice.
Compounding this silence, Minaj actively supported Ben Shapiro, a notorious Zionist propagandist, through a series of X posts in January 2024. Shapiro, founder of The Daily Wire, has a long history of defending Israel's illegal settlements, tweeting in 2010 that "settlements rock" and "Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage," rhetoric that dehumanizes Palestinians as subhuman threats to justify their dispossession since the 1948 Nakba. He routinely denies Israel's apartheid system, conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism to silence critics, and echoes Israeli military briefings that frame the Gaza genocide as "self-defense."
On January 27, 2024, Minaj celebrated Shapiro's "rap" debut on the anti-woke track "Facts" with Tom MacDonald, which hit #1 on U.S. iTunes. She tweeted: "Ben Shapiro put out a diss record... The song is #1 on US iTunes. 😂🤣😭😭😭😭😭 what is rlly happening & whos is that other man rapping???? Is this real life??!! He said 'Nicki take some notes' nah 😂😂😂😂 AYO nah." Later, she added: "Wait til they 'wake up' & listen to what Ben Shapiro is saying in #Facts The 'outrage' on this one will be a tad bit delayed," explicitly endorsing the track's content, which mocks "woke" culture and aligns with Shapiro's broader agenda of shielding Israel's ethnostate from scrutiny.
This endorsement came amid Minaj's feud with Megan Thee Stallion, where Shapiro publicly sided with Minaj, further intertwining their alliances. By hyping Shapiro's foray into hip-hop — a genre he has derided as degenerate — Minaj lent legitimacy to a figure whose "facts" routinely distort Palestinian reality, portraying their resistance as terrorism while excusing Israel's occupation, blockade, and mass killings.
Minaj's pattern extends beyond this: In October 2023, she shared a tweet from an Israeli civilian without comment, a gesture some interpreted as tacit support for Zionist narratives during the early days of the Gaza onslaught. Her silence persists into 2025, even as she engages in high-profile beefs and album promotions, revealing a selective advocacy that prioritizes personal vendettas over condemning settler-colonial genocide.
This complicity fits Hollywood's broader hasbara ecosystem, where influencers normalize Israel's impunity by amplifying voices like Shapiro's, who weaponize antisemitism accusations to undermine BDS and ICJ proceedings. Minaj's actions — celebrating a Zionist while muting Palestinian suffering — dehumanize victims of the occupation, from West Bank land thefts to Gaza's annihilation, perpetuating the logic that Arab lives are expendable and Jewish safety paramount, regardless of the apartheid state's crimes.
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🔒Silence = Complicity:
For those who have passionately spoken out against other instances of genocide and massacres, yet fall silent when it comes to the suffering endured by Palestinians, their silence becomes a glaring indictment of the value placed on Palestinian lives and perpetuates a dangerous narrative that suggests Palestinian suffering is somehow less worthy of outrage, less deserving of empathy and less human than that of others.
By choosing silence in the face of Palestinian suffering, those with influential platforms inadvertently contribute to the erasure of Palestinian voices and experiences. They perpetuate a narrative of invisibility that allows the injustices inflicted upon Palestinians to continue unabated, shielded from the spotlight of global scrutiny.
Their silence sends a chilling message of complicity to the world – one that suggests Palestinian lives are expendable, their struggles inconsequential and their humanity negotiable. It emboldens perpetrators of violence and oppression, granting them impunity under the guise of indifference.
To remain silent in the face of Palestinian suffering is to betray the very essence of activism – the relentless pursuit of justice for all, without exception or equivocation. It’s a betrayal not only of the Palestinian people but of the universal principles of human dignity and equality and instead is a tacit endorsement of the dehumanization and marginalization of an entire population.
True activism demands consistency and integrity, an unwavering commitment to speaking truth to power and standing in solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed, regardless of geography or politics.
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