Keith Ellison, in his latest attempt to dismiss concerns about his past praise for Louis Farrakhan as a “smear,” writes that it wasn’t until after 1995 that the Nation of Islam Leader’s “disparaging views on Jewish people … became clearer” to him.
This is not credible. By 1995, when a 32 year-old Ellison worked with the Nation of Islam to help organize the Million Man March in Minnesota, Farrakhan was already one of the most famous anti-Semites in America, with a well-documented history of statements disparaging Jews that had been the subject of national controversy for over a decade.
During a 1984 sermon, Farrakhan referred to Judaism as a “gutter religion.” After media reports first surfaced, he denied using the term, and as is frequently the case with anti-Semites, hid behind the idea that he was actually criticizing Israel and was misquoted. But an audiotape later revealed that he did in fact use the term. At the time, the U.S. Senate voted 95-0 to condemn Farrakhan.
In a 1985 piece condemning Farrakhan, the New Republic recounted, “In March 1984 Farrakhan said in a radio broadcast that ‘the Jews don’t like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that’s a good name. Hitler was a very great man.’ In June 1984 at the National Press Club, he repeated his belief that Judaism is a ‘dirt religion.’ In Washington last July, he said, ‘Jews know their wickedness, not just Zionism, which is an outgrowth of Jewish transgression.’ In Los Angeles in September, he offered this advice to Jews: ‘Don’t push your six million [Holocaust victims] when we lost 100 million [in slavery].'”
All of these statements were readily available when Ellison was in Law School in 1989 and defended Farrakhan against allegations of anti-Semitism.
In 1991, the Nation of Islam published a book titled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which makes the case that Jews were disproportionately responsible for the slave trade. Henry Louis Gates Jr. noted the book “massively misrepresents the historical record largely through a process of cunningly selective quotation of often reputable sources.”
Gates wrote, “Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, himself explained the real agenda behind his campaign, speaking before an audience of 15,000 at the University of Illinois last fall. The purpose of ‘The Secret Relationship,’ he said, was to ‘rearrange a relationship that ‘has been detrimental to us.'” As Gates explains, “by ‘rearrange,’ he means to convert a relation of friendship, alliance and uplift into one of enmity, distrust and hatred.” By changing the relationship between blacks and Jews, which was an important force during the civil rights struggle, he argued, the likes of Farrakhan hope to enhance their power. “[T]hey know that the more isolated black America becomes, the greater their power,” he wrote. “And what’s the most efficient way to begin to sever black America from its allies? Bash the Jews, these demagogues apparently calculate, and you’re halfway there.”
So that was Gates writing about Farrakhan in the New York Times in 1992.
Ellison had graduated law school in 1990 and spent years as a civil rights lawyer by the time he began working with the Nation of Islam on the 1995 march. So it simply isn’t plausible for Ellison to argue that somehow, “After the march, Mr. Farrakhan’s disparaging views on Jewish people, women and the LGBT community became clearer to me.”
What we do know is that the open letter that Ellison wrote condemning Farrakhan, which he often brings up in his defense, was written in 2006, which is when he was running for Congress.
In his latest post, an indignant Ellison charges that the scrutiny of his record “is a smear by factions on the right who want to pit the Jewish community and the Black community against each other.”
This is pretty rich. Ellison is the one who defended Farrakhan at a time when his anti-Semitism was well known, and worked with his organization after it engaged in an effort to split the black and Jewish communities by peddling shoddy history charging disproportionate Jewish involvement in the slave trade. And he recanted only when it became important for his national political ambitions. Now he’s mendaciously accusing others of trying to divide us. No amount of photo ops with liberal rabbis should distract us from recognizing Ellison’s true record.
