Why We Should ‘Hate’ Robert Kraft’s “Stand Up to Hate” Ad
Robert Kraft puts out spineless anti-racism Super Bowl commercial despite being racist himself.
During the big game on Sunday, there will be a non-profit advertisement called “No Reason to Hate,” paid for by the Foundation to Combat Anti-Semitism. It features celebrities Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady, who both agreed to film the commercial without compensation. The organization was started by multi-billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft in 2019 and has put out many ads promoting the message “Stand Up to All Hate.” The foundation’s goal is to spread awareness on social media about ‘fighting hate,’ primarily focusing on Jewish hate, which has grown rapidly in America over the last decade.
This ad depicts the two prominent celebrities going back and forth, saying they hate each other because of how they look, act, and talk. Then, on screen it reads, “The reasons for hate are as stupid as they sound,” then Snoop Dogg says, “Man, I hate that things are so bad that we have to do a commercial about it.” The ad is 30 seconds long and only displays one scene of the two, nothing else. Super Bowl ads this year are estimated to cost $8 million per placement.
In an interview on CNBC with Robert Kraft about the ad, the interviewer describes it as “chilling and amazing in so many ways.” Asked about his motivation for releasing it, Kraft claims it was because he’s “never seen hate like it is now in this country.” An extremely odd statement coming from an 83-year-old man who was in college when the Civil Rights Act passed and undoubtedly should have been able to see the racial hatred going on around him at the time. Giving him the benefit of the doubt though, he may have been talking about Jewish hate in particular, which is the focus of his organization. This new ad was even criticized by the far-right media rag The New York Post for not focusing enough on anti-semitism and instead opting for, what they call, ‘too all-lives matter.’ Disregarding the absurd irony of conservatives criticizing something for being ‘all-lives matter,’ one would be correct to think the ad is completely toothless and uninspired.
Before we introduce any more nuance, on it’s face the ad says virtually nothing. All the ad is saying is vaguely that ‘hate’ should be stood up to, something that should be universally understood long before someone knows what a holding flag or nickel formation is. For the people who perpetuate real racial hatred in society and are self-aware of it, this ad will not obviously affect them. But that group of people is minuscule compared to the millions of unaware people who don’t understand what racism is or don’t understand that they support racism. The most obvious example is reflected in people who defend or vote for overt racist Donald Trump and can’t evaluate racist behavior for what it is. But it’s also not that simple. Racism never ended with Martin Luther King and didn’t start up again with Donald Trump. The same racist forces of reaction that fueled the resistance to the 1964 Civil Rights Bill are the same forces that supported the War on Drugs, the 1994 Crime Bill, the War on Terror, Obama’s mass deportation, Trump’s Muslim ban, the 2024 Border Act, the Gaza genocide and reelected the guy promising to deport millions of immigrants. And this is not to say that these millions of people don’t have agency; they absolutely do. However, any fight against hate today is utterly inadequate without addressing the apologetic everyday racism that hides in dog whistles and fake crises. Racism hasn’t gone away, but now it’s at least ugly, and no one likes to acknowledge it. The only rational way to fight racism today is to expose it with an intense light and show what it looks like so there is no denying what it is. Robert Kraft’s ad absolutely fails in this aspect. The commercial trivializes hate, treating it as an intangible thing, as if it doesn’t manifest in real life. In essence, it’s no different from ‘Just Say No’ and expecting results. As lame as it was, at least the 2019 Gillette commercial confronting toxic masculinity tried to show examples of the problem it was fighting. You cannot fight hate without drawing a line and saying exactly what is unacceptable.
To understand why this commercial is so horrible, it’s paramount to look at Robert Kraft, the person. The way Kraft talks about racism is completely disconnected from reality, and it displays how he doesn’t understand the real world. When asked what is happening and why there is seemingly more hate today, he answered, “I personally believe it’s social media that was supposed to connect people, but I think it drives people apart.” This is reminiscent of the reaction that comes from conservatives when a mass shooting happens and they blame video games. It’s a cop-out, and it’s a way for Kraft to hide from America’s historically racist past, which leads up to today. Racism pre-dates social media by thousands of years, and the only way it has been defeated in the past is by directly confronting it. But to some extent, he’s correct; social media can absolutely facilitate racism, but it can also show us just how widespread the issue is; it’s lifting the veil that our country was ever not racist.
The most sickening part is that Robert Kraft himself is racist. His actions speak for themselves. Kraft, as the most public NFL owner, has taken his fanatical support for the state of Israel to the players supporting annual trips to the illegally occupied city of Jerusalem. To clarify, Israel is undeniably an apartheid state, something that has been recognized by Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, multiple human rights groups, and the United Nations. In 2017, Kraft donated $6 million to open a sports facility in Emeq HaArazim, which is not only on indigenous Palestinian land but is less than half a mile away from internationally recognized illegal settlements. Kraft was so rabidly dedicated to opposing resistance to Israel’s illegal settlements and humanitarian crimes that he was awarded the 2019 Genesis Prize for combatting the student-led BDS Movement. Current far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the time, “Israel does not have a more loyal friend than Robert Kraft.” This is the same Netanyahu who is overtly fascist, even domestically, appointed cabinet members who constantly dehumanize Palestinians, calling them animals, and who himself said, “We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness.” Kraft thinks similarly, once saying he has particular empathy for the people of Israel when he “[saw] a brown desert flourish and grow and develop and contribute to the world.” Of course, it wasn’t just a ‘brown desert’ 750,000 native Palestinians were living there before the brutal displacement of the Nakba. That sort of comment is the same infantilizing rhetoric used toward American Natives, portraying them as unproductive and thus worthless. Kraft is even a partial owner of Carmel Container Systems, American-Israeli Paper Mills, and Ampal Enterprises based in Israel.
Being a grossly wealthy billionaire, it’s no surprise he also was close with Donald Trump as late as 2017, the person who would go on to say that there were “good people on both sides” of a neo-Nazi rally and counter-protest where one person was murdered. Kraft was confronted about his affiliation with Trump on the Breakfast Club Podcast in 2024, where he downplayed the relationship as “just a social friend.” This completely contradicts the Fox News interview he did after the Patriots won the Super Bowl in 2017, where he said that Trump came to his house on Memorial weekend, called each other every week for a year, and said they were “friends” for over 20 years. Surely, after this long of a friendship, Kraft would have no problem clocking Trump as a racist, especially when he was racist publicly for years. Kraft also donated $1 million to his first inauguration fund; of course, this was after Trump ran an overtly Islamophobia campaign and then immediately instituted it once in office by issuing a ban on Muslims.
The most disgusting of Kraft’s racism was exposed during the Israel-Hamas war in 2023, where he obfuscates reality and justifies the Gaza genocide. Only three days after the Oct 7th attack, he went on an interview where he blatantly lied, saying that “in [Hamas’] charter is not just the eradication of the state of Israel but its the eradication of all Jewish people on the Earth.” Kraft says this to portray Hamas, Gaza’s primary political and military group, as a unique evil rather than what they actually are, which is a right-wing rebel group that emerged to fight against Israeli aggression and attempts by the PLO to negotiate peace. Hamas states explicitly in its current charter the distinction that its aim is anti-Zionism and that it rejects anti-semitism broadly, something that the old charter was ambiguous about. Ironically, the Israeli state inadvertently supported Hamas early in its development, trying to sow internal conflict within the Palestinian government. But Kraft pays no mind to the systemic injustice and brutality the Palestinians have suffered at the hands of Israel throughout the course of his life leading up to that uprising.
The months after the attack, Israel launched a siege on Gaza, and students across the country performed protests in solidarity with Palestinians who were indiscriminately bombed in what would become the Gaza genocide. Columbia University, Kraft’s alma mater, was the campus leading the encampment movement, which became subject to violent encounters with the police. In the end, the only Jewish people harmed by the protest were by the police, not by the protesters, especially since since Jewish Voices For Peace was a major organizer of the protest. At first, Colombia’s president defended the students’ expression of speech. Kraft announced he would withhold any donations to the university until they changed their policies. Columbia leadership would eventually comply after the pressure, deciding to smear students and make strict policy changes to punish them.
When questioned about the protest at Columbia in an interview, Kraft said that students were “glorifying the actions of Hamas” and that they were getting “false information” from social media. But Columbia students never advocated for Hamas, it’s a complete conflation. This is the same conflation that the Israeli leadership use to justify indiscriminate bombing; that no civilian is innocent. Kraft also made sure to spread lies, regurgitating that Hamas wants to eradicate all Jews and the false mass-rape narrative, which has yet to have any evidence supporting it to this day. Acknowledging that the attack was a horrific tragedy, for Kraft to knowingly exaggerate the extent of the attack to include rape without proof is a blatant example of racism; the exact sort of false allegation used to lynch African Americans like Emmett Till.
Kraft also bizarrely criticized protesters for not accepting the consequences of being arrested and that during the Vietnam War protests, the students didn’t wear masks. It goes without saying that in the 1970s, there were no cameras everywhere, part of a surveillance state where powerful billionaires went on air to call you a terrorist-sympathizer. And Robert Kraft accidentally admits this when he says that his organization “is really unique. We’re able to tell college campuses what’s going on on their campuses before their security sees it.” If we take it from the founder himself, we can confidently say that FCAS is actively alerting universities when students post things they deem anti-semitic, which includes language that is critical of Israel and Zionism. This makes sense considering his previous comment about protestors wearing masks; he would rather it be easier for his organization to identify students who protest Israel. It seems that the ads are just a facade for what FCAS really is; a social media surveillance organization.
Knowing the true motive behind Robert Kraft, there’s no wonder he doesn’t work with existing organizations like the ACLU, which actually combats anti-semitism and has been around for over a century. It’s because he perpetuates racism himself and refuses to acknowledge the humanitarian crimes of Israel. Kraft also refuses to make any statement on actual politics, balking on a chance to denounce Trump last year after his overtly hateful campaign. That is unless he’s spending $1 million to oppose a minimum wage raise proposal in Massachusetts of course. Jewish writer Dave Zirin, writing for the Nation, described Kraft’s organization as “part of the problem” and is fueling anti-semitism by conflating anti-Zionism with actual Jewish hate. That’s what makes people like Kraft so disturbing is their willingness to smear and discriminate against Jewish students who are protesting genocide. It ought to be abundantly clear by now that no billionaire will ever seriously care about the social issues of the current era and this instance is an embarrassing example of an out-of-touch elite apathetically virtue signaling while whitewashing racism and genocide.