Debbie Schlussel: Farrakhan Leftover: Nation of Islam Loon's Anti-Semitic "Reading List"
While all of the press reports from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's "Final Call," Sunday, emphatically stated that Farrakhan stayed away from anti-Semitic statements (that have been typical of his rhetoric), they were wrong.
Call it a whitewash of this Black separatist racist.
In fact, a tiny blurb at the end of today's Detroit Free Press local politics column, notes that the ADL found otherwise:
A Jewish civil rights group slammed Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan on Monday for encouraging the reading of books it says promote anti-Semitism.
During his speech Sunday at Ford Field, Farrakhan urged the crowd to read certain books, including "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews" and "The Secrets of the Federal Reserve."The former says the history of slavery in the New World was dominated by Jewish ship owners and merchants. The Anti-Defamation League says the book is based on fraudulent scholarship.
The ADL said the other book was written by an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.
This has been par for the Farrakhan course. He's always blamed Jews for Black slavery in America. But in fact, it was Muslims--NOT Jews--who sold and traded Black slaves to North America. And, as far as Jewish slave owners go, there were very few Jewish slave owners. While slave-owning is abhorrent, those who did own slaves treated them no worse than other slave owners.
When I was an undergrad at The University of Michigan, I looked into these claims by Farrakhan, and found that the University of Michigan Graduate Library has one of the most extensive collections of documentation refuting Farrakhan's claims about Jews and the slave trade, and that they are largely fictional.
No surprise there, especially given that the utterer of these anti-Semitic myths claims he was once taken into outer space by a spaceship and given his ideas by aliens.
Indeed.
Posted by Debbie on February 27, 2007 02:44 PM to Debbie Schlussel