Louis Farrakhan at 80: A Needless Legacy of Hate

Louis Farrakhan at Million Man March (1996)There are those—like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.—taken from us too soon. Then there are those who live on into historical obsolescence. And so it is that Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan who turns 80 this month.

Had Farrakhan’s battle with prostate cancer ended soon after 1996’s Million Man March on Washington, his legacy would have been quite different than now. Then, he staged a political triumph by attracting some 700,000 African Americans around such goals as reducing drug abuse and gang crime. Despite his bizarre three-hour speech at the event—free of anti-Semitism but replete with conspiracy theories right out of the UFO and anti-Masonic playbooks—he would have been lauded for the climax of his controversial career in a remarkable feat of African American cultural renewal.

Wiesenthal Center Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper and I have continued to track Farrakhan in hopes of a change of mind and heart that would open the door to a productive dialogue with the Jewish community. No such luck. What we’ve got instead are calculated teases when Farrakhan promises to meet with rabbis, combined with self-justifying declarations that he’s “only told the truth” about Jews—whom hearing “the truth hurts”—followed by renewed outbursts of anti-Semitism. In 1978, after Elijah Muhammad’s son, Warith Deen Muhammed, moved in the direction of authentic Islam, Farrakhan broke with him and reconstituted the NOI. He became notorious in the 1980s for calling Judaism a “gutter” or “dirty” religion and Hitler “a great man”—statements his apologists continue to try to explain away.
Born Louis Eugene Wolcott in the Bronx in 1933, he first tried a career as a pop singer, billed “Calypso Gene” or “The Charmer,” before emerging into prominence under the name Minister Louis X (later changed to Farrakhan), as a disciple of Malcolm X in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. Farrakhan’s NOI career had elements of a Shakespearean tragedy with him self-cast as the betrayer of his mentor, Malcolm X, whom Ossie Davis eulogized as “our own black shining prince!”

When Malcolm left the NOI for orthodox Islam, Farrakhan attacked Malcolm as “an international hobo” who should come home “to face the music” and have his head “on the sidewalk.”

In 1993, when Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, repeated her conviction that Farrakhan was involved in her husband’s assassination, he shot back: “We don’t give a damn about no white man law if you attack what we love. And frankly, it ain’t none of your business. . . . And a nation gotta be able to deal with traitors and cutthroats and turncoats. The white man deals with his. The Jews deal with theirs.” Not until 2000 did he admit: “I may have been complicit in words that I spoke” resulting in Malcolm’s assassination. Karl Evanzz, , a former report for the Washington Post, wrote a book arguing that Farrakhan’s complicity involved more than rhetoric.

Farrakhan lived after the Million Man March to fail to carry through on his renewal program and continue his prior career as a serial bigot vilifying not only Jews but Korean and Arab storekeepers, gays, single mothers, and of course the United States whose demise he predicts like a broken clock.
At last year’s Nation of Islam’s Saviours’ Day conclave, Farrakhan had harsh words toward President Barack Obama for “assassinating” Osama bin Laden as well as helping to take out the Nation of Islam’s long-time, multi-million dollar sugar daddy, Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi. Invoking his crackpot, pseudo-Islamic theology, Farrakhan explained that America was on the receiving end of heavenly wrath in the form of obesity and climate change.

As for the Jews, most belong to “the Synagogue of Satan” whose members “were not the origin of Hollywood, but took it over.” Farrakhan nevertheless tipped off “brother” Obama that he is headed for assassination—by Zionists.

At the NOI Convention, Farrakhan’s organization continued to push the libel that Jews dominated the slave trade and masterminded sharecropping and segregation, the subjects of Vol. 1 and now Vol. 2 of the anonymously-authored Farrakhanite: “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.”
Farrakhan’s conspiracy theories have run the gamut—ranging from the evil scientist Yacub who created the malevolent white race, to the evil Jews who invented AIDS and caused the hole on the ozone layer, to the evil Jews who orchestrated the recent global financial meltdown as well as world wars and Mideast conflicts. Regarding potential military conflict with a nuclear-armed Iran, he said: “I advise white and black America, Hispanic and Asian America, why would you send your children to die in a war engineered by Zionists who love Israel more than they love the United States of America?”
At UC Berkeley, he told students attending the Afrikan Black Coalition Conference not to enter coalitions or dialogue with the evil Jews, saying: “I personally don’t care if I ever get along if I’ve got to hide the truth to win a friend.”

In other speeches, Farrakhan declared that: “The Federal Reserve is the synagogue of Satan. The Rockefellers, the DuPonts, the House of Rothschild, these are the people that have corrupted the entire world.” And that “the Black man and woman have always been looked upon as the ‘property’ of White America; and particularly, members of the Jewish community. They’ve always looked at you as ‘belonging’ to them.”

Around Christmas, he said the Sandy Hook school massacre was God’s payback: “Could it be that God wants us to see that until you can feel the pain and suffering of others that has been inflicted upon them on the basis of a lie, and America’s reach for the resources of that area of the world? Then maybe you will understand that this may be ‘chickens coming home to roost’. ‘For as thou hast done’—the Book says: ‘So shall it be done unto you’.”

Now, in 2013, he offers his latest post-mortem for the U.S.: “This nation has been built on violence. Uncivilized, uncultivated, brutal, wild . . . and that’s why the prophet gave America one of those names as a beast — both of the book of Daniel and in the book of Revelations.”

At a time when Americans are increasingly concerned with the dangers of incivility and name calling, the NOI’s supreme leader remains a prime example of how not to treat Americans who differ from you in race, religion, or sexual orientation.

With a backward-looking message of hate, Farrakhan’s UFO-“mother ship” navigates cyberspace spewing noxious emissions designed to poke a hole in the ozone layer protecting tolerance. According to ADL polls, the percentage of African American “unquestionably anti-Semitic” is around 30 percent—twice the national average. Yet younger, better-educated African Americans are less—not more—prejudiced against Jews than their elders. It’s premature to call in the mourners for America’s promise of tolerance.
When future generations look back on our time, let’s hope they will remember the election (with strong Jewish as well as nonwhite support) of our first African American President: not Farrakhan’s demagogic reign of error.