“The powerful Jews are my enemy,” remarked Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan at his organization’s annual “Saviours’ Day” celebration in Chicago on February 25. That was just one of several of his choice anti-Semitic tropes. Another one, oddly stated in the third person: “The FBI has been the worst enemy of black advancement. Can you prove that, Farrakhan? You see, the Jews have control over those agencies of government.” With the exception of CNN’s Jake Tapper, hardly anyone in the mainstream media seemed to notice or care.
Farrakhan’s anti-Jewish rhetoric has a long history and is well known. In 1984, for instance, he said, “Hitler was a very great man” and, in 1985, “Don’t you forget, when it’s God who puts you in the ovens, it’s forever.” What’s far less known about Farrakhan is the warmth with which he’s embraced by influential members of the American progressive movement.
Tamika Mallory, a co-president of the Women’s March, was at the “Saviours’ Day” speech this year; two years before, she posted a photo with Farrakhan on Instagram in which she offered him praise and birthday wishes. Linda Sarsour—the left-wing Palestinian-American activist and feminist provocateur—commented on a photo of Farrakhan on the Instagram page of Carmen Perez, the treasurer of the Women’s March. “God bless him,” Sarsour said of the Nation of Islam leader.
How strange that these self-proclaimed “intersectional” feminists would support an openly misogynistic and racist demagogue like Farrakhan. Among his more recent offerings: “When a woman does not know how to cook and the right foods to cook, she’s preparing death for herself, her husband, and her children.” He’s also observed that “man is supposed to have rule, especially in his own house . . . and when she rules you, you become her child.” Directly to women he cried: “You are a failure if you can’t keep a man, no profession can keep you happy!” We wonder just what it is about him that these feminists find so alluring.
More troubling is the photo that recently surfaced of a 2005 Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) meeting with Farrakhan. It featured Illinois’s rookie senator, Barack Obama, smiling broadly at Farrakhan’s side. The photographer, Askia Muhammad, says the CBC asked him to suppress the image because it might have derailed Obama’s presidential aspirations. Nor is that the only time CBC members hobnobbed with Farrakhan: As Jeryl Bier pointed out in the Wall Street Journal in January, several of them can be seen shaking hands with Farrakhan or hugging him in a 2009 YouTube video.
We doubt the photo with Farrakhan would have hurt Obama, who easily weathered revelations of his long association with the anti-Semitic and anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright. What’s troubling is that the preponderance of mainstream journalists are happy to look the other way. We suspect that if a photo emerges some day of George W. Bush grinning with Richard Spencer or David Duke, the New York Times will have room for it on page A1.
On March 4, CBC member Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) defended his relationship with Farrakhan by remarking that “the world is so much bigger than Farrakhan and the Jewish question and his position on that and so forth.” That phrase, “the Jewish question,” rings a bell. Where have we heard that before?
