Kanye West kicked off Twitter over symbol of UFO cult Raël

Kanye West was kicked off Twitter on December 2 for posting a swastika inside a Star of David — but it turns out the image is actually the insignia for a UFO-worshiping cult and not necessarily the anti-Semitic symbol that it was widely read to be.

The group is the offbeat Raël Movement, which claims to have 50,000 members in 85 countries and is often described as a cult.

Raëlians, as they call themselves, maintain that “all life was created by the Elohim, who were extraterrestrials visiting earth from another planet,” Glen Carter, president of the British Raelian group, told Vice.

Members of the sect maintain that their symbol — offensive for obvious reasons — means no disrespect to Jewish people. As a Raëlian named Houari told Newsweek in 2020, “Don’t worry, it has nothing to do with Jews and Nazis.”

What it does have to do with, Houari insisted, is infinity — represented by the star both pointing upward and downward — and time. The swastika, which did not have negative connotations before being adopted by Adolf Hitler for the Nazi Party in 1920, is said to represent the never-ending cycle of time. 

Spokespeople for the Raël Movement insist that the group’s symbol is what their founder, the French auto-racing journalist Claude Vorhilon, saw on the front of a spaceship during his first UFO encounter in 1973. He founded the movement a year later.

Among Raël’s beliefs: Cutting-edge technologies that will save the human race can only be created with enhanced intelligence that exists right after sexual activity. So members are extremely pro-intercourse, and do it as often as possible, for the sake of humanity. Playboy even ran a story in 2004 that featured titillating photos of Raël’s so-called Pink Angels — “chosen ones” who are expected to reserve their sexual energy for the extraterrestrials.

The group’s appreciation of the swastika was made clear in 2014, when, as reported in The Post, Raëlians spent $2,000 to have a plane flying a banner calling for people to reconsider the hateful symbol. It was part of the group’s International Swastika Rehabilitation Week. Thomas Kaenzig, a Raëlian spokesperson, told The Post, “It’s very important to reclaim [the swastika] and explain to the public that this symbol has a beautiful origin.”

In 2000, Raël expressed ambitions to clone a human, a distraught couple’s 10-month-old girl who died from a “medical accident.” The group claimed to have been paid $500,000 to pull off the human duplication in a Third World laboratory. Raëlian teachings maintain that the human race came about through the cloning of alien beings and that cloning is key to eternal life.

The outcome of this effort, or if it was even attempted, is unclear.

The movement’s current goals include establishing what members call an “embassy” on Earth, preferably in Jerusalem. The embassy is necessary so that, as the belief system maintains, when scientists from the planet Elohim return here, they will have a place to live.