UK Papers mock Louis Farrakhan

Original Post Date: 2001-08-19  Posted By: Jan

From the News Archives of: WWW.AfricanCrisis.Org
Date & Time Posted: 8/19/2001 3:43:56 AM
UK Papers mock Louis Farrakhan

You can”t blame Louis Farrakhan, the man behind the 1995 Million
Man March in Washington, for seeking to have lifted the ban on his entry
to the United Kingdom. And you can”t blame Britain”s High Court for
last week”s decision approving his petition. Indeed, the only wonder
is that he was ever banned in the first place. After all, the Nation
of Islam”s leader can produce any number of glowing testimonials. “I
have respect for him,” said Al Gore”s running mate, Joe Lieberman.
Minister Farrakhan”s message, said Jack Kemp, the 1996
Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, is “wonderful.”

This would be the message that Judaism is the “Synagogue of Satan”?
Ah, well, let”s not get hung up on details. Senator Lieberman is an
Orthodox Jew, but that doesn”t mean he can”t “respect” a guy who
thinks Hitler is “a great man” and advises Joe”s crowd to try figuring out
what they did to bug him. “Everybody talks about what Hitler did to you,”
Farrakhan pointed out in 1994. “What did you do to Hitler? What made that
man so mad at you?” Senator Lieberman passed on that one, but did say
recently that he feels sure the Minister “doesn”t want to be a divisive
figure.” Thank goodness for that.

Thus, the complicated dynamic of American racial politics, of which
Britain, for all its other woes, is blessedly free. It has black
government ministers, black members of the House of Lords, black
network news anchors, black pop stars and black sporting heroes, but
no permanent elite of black grievance-mongers. On the sliding scale of
African-American community leaders, Minister Farrakhan does not have the
mainstream respectability of Jesse Jackson, the race industry”s
highest-earning shakedown artist, nor even of the Reverend Al Sharpton,
the corpulent bouffant charlatan to whom Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and all
other Democratic candidates in New York must pay court. Yet arguably
Farrakhan speaks for more of the African-American community than either of
them.

According to one poll, 59% of blacks think Farrakhan “speaks the
truth.” According to another, 40% of the participants at his 1995
Million Man March said they had negative feelings about Jews. That”s
an impressive result, not because of the proportion in and of itself
but because that”s the number who felt sufficiently relaxed about
their “negative feelings” to admit them cheerfully to The Washington
Post. In fairness to the Nation of Islam, they don”t just offend
Hymies. At a “Black Holocaust Conference,” one of Farrakhan”s
lieutenants, a “Professor of Egyptology,” held up a painting of the
Last Supper and called Christ”s Disciples “a whole lot of white faggot
boys”.

When the High Court lifted the ban on Farrakhan, Fleet Street was
roused to one of its instant fits of indignation. But to get steamed
up about Farrakhan”s bigotry is to miss the point: The Minister”s
status rests on blacks remaining a permanent victim class, and it”s
hard to be a victim unless someone”s victimizing you. Farrakhan”s
attacks on Jews in particular and “white devils” in general are not
just entirely logical, but also an excellent career move. The media
have yet to record a single occasion when the Minister”s anti-Semitic
diatribes before his large black audiences have been met with a solitary
boo. At Madison Square Garden, the line advising Jews to “remember, when
God puts you in the ovens, it”s forever” was, in fact, a big hit.

But let it go, I say. Objecting to Farrakhan as a bigot overlooks the more
basic objection that he”s a fruitcake. His Million Man March brought at
least half that number to Washington, to stand in the street listening to
a two-hour Farrakhan speech, in the course of which the former calypso
singer went into a medley of his favourite numbers: “There in the middle
of this Mall is the Washington Monument, 555 feet high. But if we put a
one in front of that 555 feet, we get 1555, the year that our first
fathers landed on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, as slaves. In the
background is the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorial. Each one of these
monuments is 19 feet high. Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president, Thomas
Jefferson the third president, and 16 and three make 19 again. What is so
deep about this number 19? Why are we standing on the Capitol steps today?
That number 19, when you have a nine, you have a womb that is pregnant,
and when you have a one standing by the nine, it means that there”s
something secret that has to be unfolded …”

You don”t have to be a numerologist to spot the flaw in this theory:
One secret that”s easily unfolded is that in 1555 there were no black
slaves on the shores of Jamestown, and no permanent immigrant settlements
anywhere in North America; Jamestown wasn”t settled until 1607, and no
slaves arrived until 1619. But if nine is the pregnant womb and one is the
known number of Jesse Jackson”s love children, then six minus one equals
five, and $5-million is the interest-free loan Colonel Muammar Gaddafi
gave Farrakhan to start his “Power Inc” company in 1985, and if you
multiply 5 by 19 you get 95, take away the 16, you”re left with 79, which
equals Farrakhan”s two stately homes in the Chicago area plus his 77-acre
rural retreat. Coincidence? Unlikely.

By the time Farrakhan had moved on to explain why the 440 cycles of
the A tone in music were reminders of Egypt in the Eighteenth Dynasty, the
U.S. media knew they had a problem. The Minister has always had his
whimsies — he claims that once a month he”s taken up into a spaceship
orbiting the Earth to commune with Elijah Muhammed — but faced with a man
talking gibberish to the biggest gathering in Washington in decades, the
American press froze. You can say a man”s dangerous and demagogic, but, if
you point out he”s a loonytoon, what does that make the huge tide of
people hanging on his every word? What does that make the popular black
magazines like EBONY, which hailed him as one of the 20th century”s
“immortal giants,” or JET, which is as punctilious about his status as the
Court Circular is about the Queen Mum”s (“The Honorable Minister Louis
Farrakhan Celebrates His 68th Birthday” ran the headline last month)? What
does that make the leading black academics who were drooling all over the
speech? It was, said Harvard”s Cornel West, “depths of black love speaking
to depths of black suffering.” Black love, black suffering, we all love
that storyline. But black nuttiness? No way. So the major newspapers
declined to report the Minister”s numerological excursions, treating those
portions of the speech like Victorian piano legs and obscuring them with
discreet ellipses. The New York Times allowed that Mr. Farrakhan”s address
was “complex.”

Racial politics in America is so toxic that white commentators can be
respectful to, alarmed by or disappointed with a black leader but they
cannot laugh at him. In the last week, every British national newspaper
has gleefully mocked every Farrakhan idiocy; after decades of coverage,
they”ve yet to be reported in the major American papers. What happens when
it”s deemed unseemly to point out how risible someone is? Farrakhan may
never achieve his goal of a separate black nation, but he”s already
leading the way to a separate black reality, where the facts of whitey”s
world go unrecognized, and instead it”s taken for granted that the AIDS
virus was invented by the CIA to kill blacks. Some on the right insist
that, underneath the overheated rhetoric, he”s an exemplary social
conservative; some on the left admire him as a pioneer of Balkanized
identity-group politics long before they were popular. But to all but the
most partisan observers Minister Farrakhan presents a more basic
conundrum: How nutso does an African-American community leader have to be
before his fellow blacks hoot with derision and walk away?

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