Stop the presses! The 78-year-old retired calypso singer and Nation of Islam leader accused Jews of controlling the government, the media, and finance and entertainment, and “repeated many of the past anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that have made him one of the nation’s foremost promoters of anti-Semitism to a legion of followers.” So says the Anti Defamation League press release following Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Sunday three-hour speech before his followers.
Give Farrakhan some credit for consistency. It’s not easy, holding an audience captive when all you’ve got are a bunch of age-old racist lies and a religion invented by some truly strange early-20th century folks.
Except this time around the master of racial hatred added a new gem to the collection: he warned that racial hatred would lead to attempts to assassinate President Barack Obama.
The Chicago Tribune said Farrakhan spent much of his speech decrying what he said was Satan’s influence over racist forces in politics and society, and then asking: “Do you think they’re wicked enough to be plotting our brother’s assassination as we speak?”
Who knows. Meanwhile, his speech was disturbing enough to elicit a reaction from Anti Defamation League National Director Abraham H. Foxman: “Farrakhan’s annual address to the Nation of Islam was dripping with anti-Semitism and hatred and should stand as a textbook example of the continuing potency in some circles of anti-Semitism in America.”
At one point, Farrakhan repeated the canard that the US is doing the bidding of the Jews in the Middle east. “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… Don’t send these children to war for the sake of Israel.”
And there was this brilliant gem, which is a bit difficult to follow logically, and perhaps not entirely worth the effort: “Did you know that Israel provoked the war in the Sudan? For 20 years or more, the Sudan was in the civil war and it started because Israel wanted to create a war in southern and northern Sudan to divert Egypt to come to the defense of the Sudan to take pressure away from Egypt attacking Israel.”
Read it a couple of times and see if it makes any more sense. We gave up.
Foxman did, too, apparently, since he expressed his surprise that “rather than laugh him off the stage, tens of thousands of supporters cheered him on and encouraged his anti-Semitism and bigotry.”
“I’m not anti-Semitic, I’m just telling the truth,” Farrakhan said at the end of a diatribe on how the Jews were responsible for that great New Yorker cover with Obama and wife giving each other the “terrorist bump.”
Everybody’s a critic..