The Millions More Movement continues to grow, 10 years after Louis Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Men’s March drew hundreds of thousands of Black males to Washington. The MMM has called a three-day event, October 14-16. Friday is “A Day of Absence” from school & work. They march in Washington on Saturday. On Sunday there will be a mass “Unity Interfaith, Interdenominational Service.”
The new model is vastly improved. Women & gays are involved. The leadership is all-inclusive politically, from Rev. Floyd Flake, an ex-Congressional Representative, backing Republican Michael Bloomberg in the New York mayoral race, thru to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton & other Democratic careerists. But beyond them, I have worked with Elombe Brath of the Patrice Lumumba Coalition, Nellie Hester of the Harlem Tenants Council & Viola Plummer of the December 12th Movement, re apartheid, Palestine & Cuba. Unto a certainty, they are selflessly dedicated to Black people’s interests.
Everyone is pleased? No. Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is furious. Black leaders attending the announcement gave Farrakhan “credibility and a pass on his anti-Semitism.” Neo-con Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee seconds Foxman. Farrakhan is “still promoting the basest type of anti-Semitism.”
They are political suicide champs. Bill Clinton, who supported the 1995 march as President, hails the MMM. So does party chair Howard Dean. Everyone thinks Jews are smart. Even Hitler thought us cunning, great at plots & schemes. But Foxman & Stern would lose a poker game to a rock.
Clinton smothered the 1995 march with kisses & one of the biggest demos in US history vanished into the history books, nothing accomplished. Now Black Democrats want the MMM focused on domestic issues & the least controversial parts of the Black international agenda, food for Niger, more AIDS money for Africa south of the Sahara, etc. Up to their eyeballs in a party funded by the rich, it gives them a chance to put on populist-face make up. A massive but politically limited event works to their electioneering advantage.
The ADL & AJC could have said ‘we support the demo, despite some of its leaders.’ But American Zionism’s leaders insist on proving Euripides right: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Now there is no evading discussion of Black/Jewish relations & Israel/Palestine. Thanks, Abe.
Democratic hopes to restrict the demo are a rerun of their ultimately unsuccessful pleas to Martin Luther King not to denounce the Vietnam war because he would lose White support for civil rights. Its impossible to have a serious massive Black demonstration in 2005 without discussing US foreign policy. AIDS does rages in Africa. Niger does face famine. A Black Secretary of State does represent Bush while Black soldiers kill & are killed in Afghanistan & Iraq. The Sudan is still in crisis. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, surrounded by corruption, acknowledges that UN troops have committed rapes in Africa.
W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, C. L. R. James, Huey Newton, Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Kwame Ture, would have insisted that a Black movement deal with every aspect of international affairs when Blacks are involved in every nook & cranny of them. The MMM can do no less.
Wool sellers know wool buyers. Zionist funders know the follies, mistakes, sins & crimes of all major characters in the Black cast. They know that most Democratic officeholders won’t break with their Jewish counterparts even if Ariel Sharon personally nuked their granny. But we can inform thousands in the MMM ranks. They can be a base for a broader American movement that can run candidates against the Republicans & Democrats, & beat Bush in the streets. Quality documentation at the Washington rally will make folks want to learn more about all the Middle Eastern issues.
The ADL/AJC rants open the MMM ranks to anti-Zionist explanations for the Jewish establishment’s rage. We must prepare leaflets re Zionism’s relations with Blacks. This genre must focus on undisputed Zionist misdeeds while explaining that Zionism doesn’t represent all Jews. From 1985 until his death in 1998, I worked with Kwame Ture in the Coalition Against Zionism and Racism. Millions of Americans knew Stokely Carmichael (his birth name) as the 60s “Black power” organizer of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He put this well in the 5/91 issue of our publication, The Anti-War Activist:
“Africans must transform the anti-war movement to an anti-capitalist and anti-Zionist movement. We have no choice. If we don’t bow down to Zionism we are chastised or destroyed. The Zionists tried to chastise Mandela for his support for the PLO. They control our community’s politicians. Look how they work harder for Israel than for Azania/South Africa! We must properly distinguish between Judaism and Zionism. But our slogan must be King’s slogan: ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'”
Israel was South Africa’s closest ally. But South African Jewish leftists played leading roles in the African National Congress struggle against apartheid.
Indeed we must do more. We must denounce Black Republicans Powell, Rice & Co., for their role in all of Bush’s war crimes. We must show Black ‘leaders’ staying on in their party while Democratic administrations sent Black tax money to Israel while it openly armed apartheid.
With the cold war against ‘godless Communism,’ Democratic & Republican administrations whipped up religious fanaticism against the Soviet Union. In 1979, Democrat Jimmy Carter started funding Islamic fundamentalists against a Stalinist regime in Afghanistan. Eventually the free world terrorists won & it was a hop, skip & jump to 9/11.
Washington’s madness had its precedent. The Social Democrats & Communists got 36% & 12% of the votes in Germany’s 1928 election. With the 1929 Depression, Germany’s capitalists weren’t thinking of killing Jews. All they wanted was a Commie-basher. Carter & Reagan needed Commie-bashers & these were handy. But pump up crackpots’ muscles with the best of all steroids, guns, & they take power, they do what they want to do, not just what their patrons wanted. Washington thought it was using them. But its terrorists thought that Allah allied with the crusaders against atheism so that they should then take on the crusaders.
We must denounce Black Congressional Democrats who said little or nothing re Wall Street’s bipartisan alliance with the Saudis & Pakistan, in making a world-class military power out of Islamic terrorism.
Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), the classic military authority, famously said, “War is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means.” Reverse his aphorism. Politics is nothing but the continuation of war by other means. A good general wants to know the strengths & weaknesses of his army as well as his foe’s. In politics, winning means overcoming your side’s failings.
Ron Daniels, a serious scholar, has declared that “It’s one thing to talk a bout a march, and quite another to put in the work to sustain a movement, which is what we want to do.” He is “committed to deal with the follow-up part of the mission, and through the Institute of the Black World we will develop ways to sustain the movement.”
That is decisive. He says that
“As a people we have often been victimized by skin politics because we do not think critically, engage in critical discussions about the issues of the day or engage in constructive criticism of our leaders. To be a critical thinker is to refuse to simply accept things as they appear on the surface, to question and analyze before acting. To complete our journey towards liberation, we need informed, tough minded, critical thinking Africans who are unwilling to accept pronouncements from on high from Black leaders or anyone else without a serious and thoughtful examination of the questions and issues at hand.”
In that light, below is a critique of Farrakhan & the Black Democrats. The MMM can only profit from such an analysis because it is a classic case of the whole being very definitely greater than the sum of its parts. Debates & scholarly panels build sustained movements. With time, the Black left can win over the MMM ranks to scientific politics.
Following the critique are documents incriminating Zionists in crimes against Blacks. Readers are encouraged to pass them along via the internet & to turn them into leaflets at MMM events.
LOUIS FARRAKHAN
In many respects, Louis Farrakhan is one of the most incredible figures in America. Oxymoronism (Greek oxys/acute – moros/foolish), has become an intellectual buzz word, but there is no better example of it than the leader of the Nation Of Islam.
He came to national attention after Malcolm X broke with the Nation & its leader, Elijah Muhammad. He was a leading NOI ranter against Malcolm, who had recruited him to the Nation. “Louis X” announced in the 12/4/64 issue of Muhammad Speaks that Malcolm was
“like the famous rebel, Korah, in the times of Moses…. Another parable depicting Malcolm is that of Judas…. The die is set and Malcolm shall not escape, especially after such evil talk about his benefactor (Elijah Muhammad) in trying to rob him of the divine glory which Allah has bestowed upon him. Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death, and would have met death if it had not been for Muhammad’s confidence in Allah for victory over the enemies.”
On 2/21/65 elements in the Nation of Islam assassinated Malcolm. Farrakhan admitted this in the 3/29/93 issue of his present journal, The Final Call:
“I’m not a killer, but when you mess with that man (Elijah Muhammad) I become that, because that man gave me life. Elijah Muhammad taught me what I know. He taught me how to eat to live that I could produce children of consequence. If you want to live, you leave that man alone where we are concerned. When Malcolm stepped across that line death was inevitable.”
But on 5/6/95 he confessed to Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, at a public meeting called to acknowledge their crime. FBI head
“J. Edgar Hoover was determined that no Black Messiah would rise to unite our people in their quest for justice and true liberation…. Our zeal, our love and hatred, our ignorance was manipulated by powerful outside forces and the result is that members of the Nation of Islam were involved in the assassination of Malcolm X.”
In 1965, Black outrage at the murder isolated the NOI. Then, after Elijah Muhammad’s 1975 death, his son Wallace abandoned Black nationalism for Sunni Islam. He renamed the movement the American Muslim Mission. In 1978 Farrakhan broke with the AMM & reconstituted the Nation.
In his prime, Farrakhan was a sensational orator. In 1968, the Mayor of San Francisco announced the arrest of a group within the NOI for murdering whites on their own, not under orders from the sect. Farrakhan came immediately to the University of California at Berkeley. He spoke to a packed house. He assured everyone that the Nation had nothing to do with the crimes. He came to find out if the accused were guilty. If they were, they should go to prison.
Black & white, from left to right, you can’t imagine a more skeptical audience. But within minutes everyone felt relaxed as he discussed the Black situation. He spoke for an hour, then took questions. Towards the end, he referred to his speech as “my symphony,” & got loud applause from people, many having come there thinking they would hear someone whose followers murdered innocent whites at his orders. I challenge anyone to match that for rhetorical success. (The accused went to prison. The murders stopped. Black radicals, along with everyone else, took that to mean that they were indeed guilty. Today no one accuses the NOI of involvement in their conspiracy.)
A triumph it was, yet his later notions run from sane to crackpot. Perhaps his most grotesque concoction was a 10/28/92 speech, “Obedience is the highest form of sacrifice,” in which he told the world that, after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, “Shabazz” was punished for creating the 1st white. He
“took his family into the jungles of… Africa, to make a people close to nature. And the Hon. Elijah Muhammad said this is the origin of ‘kinky’ hair because we didn’t have ‘kinky’ hair prior to that, the hair on our head was like the hair on our eye brow…. Wouldn’t you like the hair on your head to be as straight as the hair on your eye brow? That’s why you are so busy frying it…. Because most of your family of other black people on earth, jet black, they didn’t have no broad nose and thick lips and ‘kinky’ hair…. We are marked as a different kind of black person and we were rejected and despised not only from the circle of the Gods, but we were despised and rejected by all the other dark people….
Why are we rejected? Because the essence of beauty is in obedience and submission to God and the essence of ugliness is when you rebel against God. And when you rebel against God, in your rebellion you are marked with a certain mark of your rebellion; which is the disfigurement of your internal self which manifests in the disfigurement of your external self. And this is why when you look at our people, wherever we are found on the earth, you find us disfiguring ourselves physically because we are disfigured on the inside because of rebellion.”
This outraged nationalist intellectuals. Elombe Brath declared that “this is an indication of how many of our people, even some so-called leaders, have internalized these notions propagated by our enemies.” (Amsterdam News, 2/13/93)
During the build up for the 1995 march, Farrakhan told a Washington rally that “10 years ago he had a vision of being swept into a UFO that took him to a larger mothership. There, he said, the late Elijah Muhammad told him that then President Ronald Reagan was plotting a war. He said the vision ended with him being beamed to Earth from the spaceship. ‘I really don’t care if you think I’m a nut,'” he said, “explaining to the audience that he had debated even sharing the story.” (Washington Post, 9/18/95)
Of course such blather isn’t why Zionists denounce him. Decades ago, I was in New York’s Madison Square Garden when Billy Graham told us that he believed that, after they die, God sends Christians to other planets to convert the people there. And Graham admits that he shared Richard Nixon’s anti-Semitism. But the ADL didn’t tell people not to attend his recent New York fairwell. Their hostility to Farrakhan is an outgrowth of the “Hymietown” affair during Jesse Jackson’s 1984 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Jackson called NYC Hymietown in a ‘let’s talk Black’ chat with a Black reporter. Hymie was a Jewish name of the immigrant generation. He could have explained that ‘talkin’ Black’ means using slang. Indeed Jews, when talking informally about some Jewish aspect of the city, have been known to call it Jew York. But Jackson denied he said it, then confessed his dread crime.
After demonstrations against Jackson by the terrorist Jewish Defense League, Farrakhan warned that there would be retaliation “if you harm this brother.” He expounded on Israel:
“The Zionists are those Jewish persons who wanted a homeland for the Jews…. but they wanted to fulfill the vision without fulfilling the preconditions…. It was your cold naked scheming…. against the lives of a people there in Palestine…. you pushed out the original inhabitants…. Now that nation called Israel never has had any peace…. because there can be no peace structured on injustice, thievery, lying and deceit and using the name of God to shield your gutter religion under His holy and righteous name…. You hate us because we dare to say that…. It is the black people in America that is the chosen people of almighty God.”
Jackson happily accepted Farrakhan’s support for his campaign. But he had to denounce him over “gutter religion.” However that didn’t hurt Farrakhan. In 1985 he packed national auditoriums, denouncing Jews. Stanley Crouch explained why in the 10/29/85 Village Voice:
“When Farrakhan… baited Jews… he… plumbs the battles that have gone on between black people and Jews for almost 20 years. He speaks to (though not for) those who have fought with Jews over affirmative action, or have felt locked out of discussions about Middle East policy by Jews.”
Add Israel’s alliance with Pretoria to Crouch’s issues. After Hymietown, most Black Democratic office holders never made an issue out of Israel/South Africa. Their careers were more important to them than the rights or lives of Palestinians or South Africans. But many Blacks knew of the alliance. Farrakhan took it on, so they listened, even while voting Democrat.
The NOI had a group of young scholars research the Jewish role in Black slavery. Its Research Department published The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. I reviewed it in 1992 in NY’s Amsterdam News. I said that if I were a prof, I’d give it a B.
It accurately dealt with the extent of Jewish involvement in Christian enslavement of Blacks. But they said nothing about Jewish slave merchants in the Muslim world. Re the US, the book completely distorted the role of Theodore Wiener.
A German Jew, he came to Kansas in the 1850s, to trade with both sides during the struggle between the slavery & free-state forces. He was pro-slavery but his Jewish partners were abolitionists. A pro-slavery German, assuming that he was an abolitionist like his partners, tried to kill him. Instead, Wiener beat up the slaver. He then took refuge with his neighbors, John Brown’s sons. Brown converted him to his racially egalitarian radical abolitionism.
But the RD’s sole statement about Wiener was in an appendix, “Jews of the Black Holocaust.” It listed reprehensible Jews during slavery: “Theodore Wiener proclaimed himself to be a ‘rank pro-slavery man’ {1255}.” Note 1255 sent us to the American Jewish Archives, vol. 8, p 92. But there we found
“Theodore Wiener, Bondi’s business partner who had lived in Texas and Louisiana, was a “rank pro-slavery man.” When Wiener went to Kansas he refused to join the pro-slavery group, but continued to do business with them. It was only after an unsuccessful attempt on his life by a brother of the notorious Dutch Henry that he openly joined forces with the anti-slavery faction (August Bondi, in Memoirs of American Jews 1775-1865, vol. 2).”
Wiener was one of seven volunteers who accompanied Brown on the glorious night of 5/24-25/1856. Missouri ‘border ruffians’ had wrecked Lawrence, an abolitionist town. Timid anti-slavery leaders put up no resistance. Then Brown heard that triumphant Pottawatomie Creek slavers had threatened to kill the local abolitionists. Brown decided to punish them.
Wiener executed two of the five slavers brought to judgment, after two of Brown’s sons wouldn’t slay them. Wiener was nothing less than a central figure in Act I, Scene 1 of the downfall of American slavery. The RD demoting Brown’s “terrible swift sword” back to a “pro-slavery man” was fantastic.
I gave them a B instead of an F because the book was put together by a team, each member handling a chapter. It was possible that the editor didn’t know that one of his guys did a hatchet job on Wiener. But on 3/1/2000, I lectured at Wellesley College, in defense of a Black professor who had been denounced for using their book in his Black studies class. I gave its good & bad points. RD folks were present but said nothing in the discussion period. Then they posted a response to my critique on their website:
“The three Jews mentioned by Brenner, August Bondi, Theodore Wiener and Jacob Benjamin, wanted nothing more than to sell their wares to whichever side had ready cash and were not abolitionist ideologues by any reckoning. They became accidentally involved in an on-going border war which pitted pro-slavery forces against abolitionists, neither of whom welcomed Blacks as equals in mind, body or rights.”
A still pro-slavery businessman didn’t execute slavers after the great abolitionist’s own sons wouldn’t do it. Bondi tells us how impressed he was by Brown converting Wiener into a radical abolitionist. Their 2000 defense means that I was wrong in 1992. I should have given them an F.
Fortunately, that element later got discredited inside the NOI. Farrakhan gained credibility in the 90s when he stepped forward to care for Ture as he battled cancer. Indeed Eric Muhammad of the NOI was Kwame’s physical attendant when I paid my last visit to him. After our taped discussion, I went to the next room to pack up to leave. As I went by Kwame’s door I heard Eric warn him that I was a Jew. “He’s a revolutionary!” were the last words I heard my comrade speak. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins. But I confess that the great Black liberator’s words made me proud. Imagine my further joy when I read the 8/23/03 AmNews:
“James G. Muhammad… editor of… The Final Call, has lost his job for mishandling a story that erroneously implicated Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. and Samuel “Billy” Kyles in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King…. The original story carried the… byline of Eric Ture Muhammad…. Eric Ture Muhammad… also resigned.”
Farrakhan cleaned up his act. Today’s weekly combines writings of Elijah Muhammad & transcribed Farrakhan orations with material from outside Black & US left writers. Farrakhan & others are sometimes politically wrong. But they are often on target.
In the end, the key question is whether Farrakhan is an anti-Semite today. The answer is no. He believes that his grandfather, a white Portuguese, was of Jewish decent. He loves Jewish liturgical music, heard as a child in Boston. He gave up the violin when he became an NOI minister, only taking it up again in the 90s, with his Jewish teacher. In 1993 he publically played Felix Mendelssohn’s violin concerto. The NY Times reported that he “talked of reconciliation with American Jews.” He would “try to do with music what cannot be done with words and try to undo with music what words have done.”
In 1996, he met Edgar Bronfman, President of the World Jewish Congress. Bronfman thought the meeting went well. Later, Farrakhan made a speech, comparing Iraqi children’s hunger & deaths to the holocaust. This was too much for Bronfman. How dare anyone compare Iraqi deaths to Jewish deaths! He ended their talks.
Farrakhan continued showing that he isn’t hostile to Jews qua Jews. The 11/30/99 Final Call front paged a photo of him meeting anti-Zionist Orthodox rabbis:
“The Honorable Elijah Muhammad hinted to us in one of his writings that the problem between the Jewish community and us in the United States would be worked out. So we believe that this (meeting) is not accidental… this is part of God’s divine planning for us.”
No mincing words: Anyone who thinks a Black who talks about his Jewish grandfather, has rabbis as guests & brings his Jewish teacher on stage to share his bows, is an anti-Semite, desperately needs a Jewish psychiatrist.
While Foxman evolves into an ever greater crank, even in Democratic eyes, today’s NOI is well past its shameful Malcolm episode. The 8/9 Final Call warned foreign Muslims here “to resist the lure of fanaticism and suicide martyrdom.”
The problem with Farrakhan’s anti-Zionism is that he sermonizes against Israeli oppression. Then his audience goes home. Nothing happens. Black radicals must call on the MMM to organize demos at Israeli consulates across the US. Farrakhan & the rabbis of the Neturei Karta (The Guardians of the City) talked the talk. The MMM should invite them to walk the walk together, for equality & justice in a democratic secular binational Palestine/Israel.
THE BLACK DEMOCRATS
Blacks & Jews vote overwhelmingly Democrat. However most Blacks don’t give a penny to Black politicians. Jews are only 2% of Americans but a 1985 American Jewish Congress pamphlet, The Political Future of American Jews, estimated that “as much as a quarter of Republican funds have come from Jewish sources.” The 1/5/93 NY Times declared that “Jews contributed about 60 percent of Mr. Clinton’s noninstitutional campaign funds,” i.e., money from individuals.
If Black Democrats take on Zionism, Jewish money which they get thru the party turns against them. Georgia’s Cynthia McKinney’s defeat in the 2002 House election was due to out of state Zionist cash going to her rival. Fear makes cowards out most Black office holders. But some are more than mere cowards.
Demagoguery is making use of popular prejudices for political advantage. By the dictionary, many prominent Black Democrats are demagogues. Hustling money & votes in New York City, where Jews are 10% of the population, ends up with US weapons going to Israel, which legally discriminates against Arabs. In the modern world, legal discrimination against any ethnic group automatically produces resistance. Those weapons get used. Playing to domestic Jewish chauvinism here becomes a war crime there, whether committed by Blacks or Whites.
Democrat Jim Zogby of the Arab-American Institute told it all re David Dinkins, the city’s only Black Mayor, in the 10/17/89 Newsday:
“In 1988, Arab-Americans worked with David Dinkins and his campaign manager, Bill Lynch, in support of Jesse Jackson. They raised significant amounts of money for the campaign and participated in voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts.
In 1989 David Dinkins has turned his back on this community. I attended a meeting with Lynch in which Arab-Americans were told that they could not develop a support group for the campaign, could not organize a fundraiser that would be attended by Dinkins and could not be visibly associated with the candidate. The reason given was that it might cost Dinkins Jewish votes.”
Former Citibank Exec Carl McCall ran for Governor of New York in 2002. The 3/13/02 Times ran a photo captioned “State Comptroller H. Carl McCall’s visit to Israel last week included target practice with an M-16 assault rifle.” He was “conducting shooting practice at what his aides said was an antiterrorist camp at an undisclosed location in Israel.”
His ad in the 8/30/02 Forward, the leading ‘Jewish community’ weekly, declared that he was “the 1st Comptroller to invest New York State pension funds in State of Israel Bonds, declaring it ‘a good financial investment and an important moral investment in the Middle East’s only democracy.'”
William Thompson, the city’s Comptroller, is just as bad. The 10/3/03 Jewish World had him to the right of Bush: “Thompson said that the administration is wrong to threaten to withhold loan guarantees from Israel because of settlement-building in the West Bank.”
Jesse Jackson stopped running for President after 1988. But cabinet member was still possible. However he knew that couldn’t be done if the Israel lobby only thought of him re Hymietown. So he showed up in Brussels in 1992 for a World Jewish Congress conference: “Zionism by its soundest definition [is] a liberation movement whose object is to secure a state for its people. It must be seen as that, and not with negative connotations attached to it.” (Newsday, 7/8/92) According to that day’s NY Times, “He said the recent repudiation by the United Nations of its resolution equating Zionism and racism was like the Berlin wall coming down.”
Perpetual candidate Al Sharpton did what Democratic hustlers did before him. In 2001, the Israeli consulate & Sharpton’s National Action Network organized a meeting of victims of a Tel Aviv suicide bomb & Blacks who lost family members in the World Trade Center. A gathering for terror victims sounds like the best kind of ecumenicalism. But it was part of a campaign to get into the good graces of the Jewish establishment. The 11/30/01 Forward announced that “Sharpton is expected next month to visit with Jonathan Pollard in his North Carolina prison. Mr. Pollard’s wife… said the visit would be sponsored by the Israeli consulate.”
Pollard is an American Jew doing big time as an Israeli spy. Zionists say he should be let out ASAP because, after all, he was spying for an ally. The military brass insists that he do every second of his sentence. Its hard to believe that Sharpton thought his visit could help Pollard. It was aimed at the US Jewish establishment: Do right by me & I will do right for you.
John Conyers represents Michigan in the House. The state is the only one where Arab votes are potentially crucial. He is on the left of his party re the Middle East. He once put an article of mine into the Congressional Record. But in the wake of charges that someone said something anti-Semitic at an informal hearing on Iraq that he convened, the 6/24/05 Forward had him dutifully announcing that he was a “friend and supporter of Israel.”
I met Conyers in 1988. He’s a pussy cat personally & we had a great time. But he made it clear that he was “a Democrat, not a petunia.” Now, proclaiming support for Israel, he is still saying that he is not a petunia. His homicidal party is better than the Republicans on other issues more important to him than Palestinian rights.
The 6/14/05 Final Call quoted Mary Berry, ex-chair of the US Commission on Civil Rights: “Everyone knows that Blacks are the most loyal folk to the Democratic Party…. And what do we get for our loyalty? African Americans should form an independent political movement, not a party… and say, ‘This is what our issues are and any candidate who supports these issues we will support. And if you don’t support them, we won’t support you.'”
Farrakhan takes this a step further. Final Call says that he
“argues that Black people are not being respected by either Democrats or Republicans, and he recently expressed the potential strength of an independent candidacy for president in 2008. In a panel discussion before the National Conference of Black Mayors in April, Minister Farrakhan said, ‘If we leverage our strength, we’ll make both parties bow and you’ll get what you’ve been looking for all the time that you’ve been serving the Party.'”
As the MMM grows, his perspective enlarges. In the 8/23 Final Call he asks a reasonable question: “So why do Black people and Latino people, Native American and White people themselves need the Millions More Movement?” He answered his own question: “You no longer have representative government. How can these rich speak for the poor?”
Farrakhan talks about “a party of the poor.” But he isn’t about to lead it. Progressive notions share Final Call with denunciations of “marijuana, pork, de-natured food and canned goods.” For him, the curse of ham is as bad for Blacks as the Biblical curse of Ham. But other MMM leaders, like Huey & Kwame before them, go right on eating pig & smoking pot. They correctly march with him when he is right & go their own way when he is wrong.
In that spirit, they must build 10/15. Then they must organize the promised educational program. Debates, starting with discussion of Farrakhan’s proposal for “an independent candidacy in 2008,” indeed in 2006, must be a top MMM priority.
LENNI BRENNER is the editor of Jefferson & Madison on Separation of Church and State: Writings on Religion and Secularism and a contributor to The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He also edited 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis. He can be reached at BrennerL21@aol.com.
*****
“Dr. von Weisl Believes in Fascism,” World Jewry (London), 6/12/1936:
[Note: The prime ideological force in Ariel Sharon’s party, the Likud (Union), is a movement calling itself Zionist-Revisionism, founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky, an avowed colonialist.
After the British conquered Palestine during WW l, the League of Nations gave London a ‘mandate’ to rule the country. Britain had promised to create a ‘homeland’ in Palestine as bait to get Jewish support during the war. But Jabotinsky realized that London was only using the Zionists as a cat’s paw against the Arab natives, without intending to set up a Jewish state. The Revisionists looked for a new mandatory. Their 1st choice was Fascist Italy, Britain’s imperial rival in the Mediterranean & Africa.
In contrast, most of Jewish political opinion opposed Mussolini & denounced Revisionism as Jewish fascists. – LB]
The French newspaper in Bucharest, the “Moment,” which is regarded as one of the organs of the Roumanian Foreign Ministry, has published an interview with the Revisionist leader, Dr. von Weisl.
The Revisionist leader accused the Zionist leaders of Socialist sympathies, and he declared that, although opinions among the Revisionists varied, in general they sympathized with Fascism, and they were strong opponents of Socialism and Communism.
He, personally, was a supporter of Fascism, and he rejoiced at the victory of Fascist Italy in Abyssinia as a triumph of the White races against the Black. He also asserted the Revisionists wanted to bring to Palestine, within the next ten years, 900,000 Jews from Poland, 300,000 from Roumania and 300,000 from Germany.
Finally, he stated that the Revisionists had no desire to colonize Jews in Abyssinia, and that, in his opinion, it would be well for the Arab strike in Palestine to continue for several weeks more, as by then the authority of the Arab leaders would be completely broken for a number of years.
*****
Eren Kaplan, The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism And Its Ideological Legacy, University of Wisconsin Press, (2005) p. 156:
[Note: Benito Mussolini responded to the Revisionists by training their youth group, Beitar, at his naval academy. – LB]
The Revisionist leadership was well aware of the potential implications of opening a school in fascist Italy, as this would provide the Revisionists’ opponents with propaganda material. Revisionist leaders wanted the cadets to keep away from any involvement in local politics…. Nonetheless, the Beitar cadets were very involved in local politics. In his History of Hebrew Seamanship Halperin wrote that the cadets, despite opposition from their superiors, expressed public support for Mussolini’s regime. During the Italian campaign in Ethiopia the Beitarist cadets march alongside Italian soldiers in a demonstration in support of the war, and it was brought to Halperin’s attention that they collected metal scraps and sent them to the Italian weapons industry.
*****
Drew Middleton, “South Africa Needs More Arms, Israeli Says,” NY Times, 12/14/81:
The military relationship between South Africa and Israel, never fully acknowledged by either country, has assumed a new significance with the recent 10 day visit by Israel’s Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon, to South African forces in Namibia along the border with Angola.
In an interview during his recent visit to the United States, Mr. Sharon made several points concerning the South African position.
First, he said that South Africa is one of the few countries in Africa and southwestern Asia that is trying to resist Soviet military infiltration in the area.
He added that there had been a steady flow of increasingly sophisticated Soviet weapons to Angola and other African nations, and that as a result of this, and Moscow’s political and economic leverage, the Soviet Union was “gaining ground daily” throughout the region.
U.N. ARMS EMBARGO
Mr. Sharon, in company with many American and NATO military analysts, reported that South Africa needed more modern weapons if it is to fight successfully against Soviet-Supplied troops. The United Nations arms embargo, imposed in November 1977, cut off established weapons sources such as Britain, France and Israel, and forced South Africa into under-the-table deals.
Under these arrangements, weapons and spare parts are sold by major European arms producers to nongovernmental middlemen. The latter sell the arms to South Africa, usually shipping them in secret, either through a country that is nonaligned or one where customs inspectors are prepared to look the other way for a bribe.
Israel, which has a small but flourishing arms export industry, benefited from South African military trade before the 1977 embargo.
According to The Military Balance, the annual publication of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the South African Navy includes seven Israeli-built fast attack craft armed with Israeli missiles. The publication noted that seven more such vessels are under order. Presumably the order was placed before the 1977 embargo was imposed.
SHORTAGE OF SPARE PARTS
Because of the embargo, South Africa faces an acute shortage of spare parts. Some spare parts for its British-made centurion tanks have arrived in South Africa via the Channel Islands, according to British sources. There are other reports that South Africa has purchased 41 Centurions and the Tiger cat missile system from Jordan.
With some surreptitious help from foreign friends, South Africa has also managed to deploy the Entac antitank missile, manufactured in France, and a modern radar system covering its northern frontiers.
South Africa’s arms industry has so far made the country self-sufficient in a number of areas including small arms, bombs, mortars and armored cars, according to the British source. South Africa is also producing on license the French designed Mirage fighter.
South Africa, in the view of NATO analysts, is superior militarily and will remain so for some years in the air and at sea. The air force with its 239 combat aircraft, including 48 Mirage fighters, is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to any other air force or combination of air forces south of the Sahara.
Mr. Sharon said Moscow and its allies had made sizable gains in Central Africa and had established “corridors of power,” such as one connecting Libya and Chad. He said that Mozambique was under Soviet control and that Soviet influence was growing in Zimbabwe.
The Israeli official, a successful commander of armored forces in two wars with the Arabs, saw the placement of Soviet weapons, particularly tanks, throughout the area as another danger.
South Africa’s military policy of maintaining adequate reserves, Mr. Sharon said, will enable it to keep forces in the field in the foreseeable future but he warned that in time the country may be faced by more powerful weapons and better armed and trained soldiers.
*****
LENNI BRENNER, “Ture’s Jewish Friend,” Village Voice (Letters), 8/20/91:
Nat Hentoff’s August 13 denunciation of Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) as an anti-Semite [“Blacks and Jews. Those Were the Days”] gives a false picture of him. Hentoff claims that “to Ture and other passionate anti-Semites… the words ‘Jew’ and ‘Zionist’ are utterly interchangeable.” Really? Ture knows I’m a Jew. Yet he has been a guest in my home, and in May he contributed an article to The Anti-War Activist, which I edit. He did this because I’m an anti-Zionist, and, as he wrote, “We must properly distinguish between Judaism and Zionism. But our slogan must be King’s slogan: ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'”
Hentoff paints Kwame as a menace to Jews. He claims that, after Ture spoke at the University of Maryland in 1986, “swastikas were drawn on the door of the Jewish student newspaper office.” Does Hentoff believe that Ture had anything to do with attacking that office with the symbol of white racism? Similarly, he says that in February of this year, after Ture spoke at Amherst, an Israeli flag was burned. Again Hentoff doesn’t tell us if he believes Kwame had anything to do with the incident. But he gives us this not too subtle innuendo: “Jewish students got the message, and it wasn’t only about Israel.” However, there were no slogans against Jews, or Hentoff would have told of them.
Ture has been speaking on campuses for years. Hentoff obviously cited from a dossier reporting his activities. Yet these two incidents, five years apart, are the only physical acts even insinuated to have involved this “passionate anti-Semite.”
Hentoff guotes Ture’s defiant line: “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.” Obviously this is rhetoric. Not even Hentoff claims Ture tries to kill Zionists. And surely Hentoff, a “good” Zionist, i.e., opposed to Israel’s constant crimes, doesn’t dispute the African political context for this cry of outrage: an Israeli military mission gave Idi Amin the strategy to come to power in Uganda; Israel arms South Africa; it reorganized Doe’s secret police in Liberia and armed Mengistu in Ethiopia; it trains Mobutu’s army in Zaire. These are crimes against Africa.
Kwame knows I don’t share his rhetorical style. I don’t talk about dead Zionists, dead anybody. But I agree with his essential point. Just as there were no good Nazis, there are no good Zionists. If you support a movement, and it commits murder, you don’t try to be a loyal opposition. You break with it, root and branch, and you do what you can to destroy it. If you stay inside such a movement, you end up a good-for-nothing, denouncing those who really do fight against its crimes.
*****
LENNI BRENNER, The ADL’s National Director is Crazy like a Foxman (1993):
The ADL and the affirmative action question
As many readers well know, whole Canadian forests have been chopped down in recent years to provide newsprint for articles on Black anti-Semitism. Such pieces frequently begin with a nostalgic look back at the good ol’ ‘Black-Jewish alliance’ of the early 1960s when the ADL was part of the great — dare I say it? — multicultural coalitions that marched behind Martin Luther King.
Such articles usually then turn into tales of Black ingratitude. In life the Jewish establishment was only part of such an alliance until the Black movement began to call for affirmative action quotas, and the left-wing of the movement began to support the Palestinians as fellow oppressed. From then on the ADL has been a fanatic opponent of Black liberation. Jonathan Kaufman’s Broken Alliance tells of how Jack Greenberg, long-time head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, came to see the ADL:
“As legal cases involving affirmative action began to appear in the courts in the early 1970s, the Legal Defense Fund began filing lawsuits… One of the first cases involved a challenge to the New York prison system, which had never promoted a black correction officer above the entry level… The Legal Defense Fund sued successfully… When the case was appealed, Greenberg was stunned to discover that the Anti-Defamation League had filed a brief opposing the affirmative action plan… He did not know officials at the ADL well. But he… called several of them up… (Eventually) Greenberg felt some officials of the ADL, the most vociferous opponents of affirmative action, had become ‘haters.'” (pp. 111-112)
In its most notorious anti-affirmative action campaign, the ADL was one of a gaggle of right-wing Jewish groups, plus several gentile “unmeltable ethnic” outfits, the Fraternal Order of Police, the Chamber of Commerce and other free-market freedom-fightin’ guys, who submitted amici curiae briefs on Allen Bakke’s behalf when he sued the University of California at Davis for setting aside 16 seats in its medical school for minorities. In 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that the school’s plan discriminated against whites.
In the August 1985 issue of Commentary, Harvard sociology professor Nathan Glazer gave us the “pragmatic considerations” behind the Jewish establishment’s undying hatred of quotas:
“Jews were already ‘over-represented’ in the institutions that were becoming battlefields… If it were to be generally conceded that each ethnic/racial group should be represented proportionately… what would happen to the over-represented?”
There is no doubt that Glazer, who is intimate with the Jewish establishment, was referring to the ADL, amongst the others, when he wrote the above. And in fact the ADL does give a distinctly ‘Jewish’ spin to its opposition to quotas. The December 1978 ADL Bulletin quotes Nathan Perlmutter, Foxman’s predecessor as National Director, on quotas:
“The message of the 1960s civil rights movement, he explains, was to be color blind, to judge a person on his individual merits. ‘Now, guided and abetted by government agencies, there is massive backsliding to quotas, to evaluating a person on such extraneous factors as race. The simple incontrovertible fact is that quotas in favor of one group, by definition, means quotas against another group. That’s the very essence of the Nuremberg Laws.'”
According to the November 1979 ADL Bulletin, the ADL “submitted a ‘friend of the court’ brief” in a case, Fullilove v. Kreps,
“concerned with the constitutionality of the Federal Public Works Employment Act of 1977, which provides that no grant for public works shall be made unless the applicant assures… that at least 10 percent of each grant sum be expended for ‘minority’ business enterprises… (The) ADL… opposes this quota and questions the legality of laws which establish governmentally-designated and protected groups. ‘Stamping the imprimatur of the Federal government upon a particular racial or ethnic definition, and granting and withholding benefits to individuals accordingly,’ our brief points out, ‘calls to mind notorious examples of attempts by other governments to define racial and ethnic groups, such as the Nuremberg laws in the Third Reich defining a ‘Jew.'”
People get sent to mad houses for a lot less than this. The notion that a law, doubtlessly supported by a majority of congressional Democrats, designed to bring a small measure of economic justice to Blacks, Spanish-speakers, Orientals, Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts, was really no better than Nazi anti-Jewish legislation, takes my breath away. The idea that affirmative action quotas in favor of minorities, might be used, someday in the future, as a pretext to discriminate against Jews, is a notion that hasn’t occurred to anyone outside the Jewish establishment. There were Jews among the congressional majorities that voted in every affirmative action law. Surely no such scheme was thought to be sanctioned by them. Were the gentiles in those congresses, black or white, even remotely contemplating discrimination against Jews? Of course not!
The Nazi laws were measures taken against a minority hated by the German government. American affirmative action laws are policies projected by a government with a white majority in favor of minorities. Jews are affected only insofar as they are overwhelmingly white. And, of course, affirmative action has actually benefited Jews. Glazer points out that
“(F)emales were one of the groups designated as beneficiaries of affirmative action. Thus… one could argue that Jewish women were as much helped by affirmative action as Jewish men were hurt, or helped even more than Jewish men were hurt.”
Arguments utilizing previous discrimination against Jews to oppose present proposals to redress past discrimination against America’s ethnic minorities and women, are ideological self-deceptions, at best, and sophistries at worst. They are designed to put a pseudo-progressive gloss on efforts to preserve the economic status quo. And, as affirmative action in favor of women stands or falls with similar policies towards Blacks and other minorities, such specious reasoning is a razor against the interest of the majority of Jews, who, as with all other groups, are majority female.
*****
LENNI BRENNER is the editor of 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis and a contributor to The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at BrennerL21@aol.com.
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CLARIFICATION
ALEXANDER COCKBURN, JEFFREY ST CLAIR, BECKY GRANT AND THE INSTITUTE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF JOURNALISTIC CLARITY, COUNTERPUNCH
We published an article entitled “A Saudiless Arabia” by Wayne Madsen dated October 22, 2002 (the “Article”), on the website of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity, CounterPunch, www.counterpunch.org (the “Website”).
Although it was not our intention, counsel for Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi has advised us the Article suggests, or could be read as suggesting, that Mr Al Amoudi has funded, supported, or is in some way associated with, the terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist network.
We do not have any evidence connecting Mr Al Amoudi with terrorism.
As a result of an exchange of communications with Mr Al Amoudi’s lawyers, we have removed the Article from the Website.
We are pleased to clarify the position.
August 17, 2005