A Minister Says Far Worse Things than Ye or Kyrie
A reflection on the growing antisemitism in the U.S. and who should take the lead in fighting it
December 3, 2022. Many people have written about the antisemitism shown in the comments/tweets of Ye and Kyrie Irving, but far worse are the vehement remarks of Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam in defense of the two. He spoke online on the 11th of November in a 56-minute video commentary.
He starts off with deliberate vagueness talking about “the enemy”. At 3 minutes into the video he says the “controversy” about the two men is causing division and that “we don't see the enemy who is working 100% to bring bloodshed among us.” He doesn’t tell who he is talking about when he says, “the enemy”.
He says, “What did Kyrie do wrong?”. He answers, “he’s searching for the knowledge of himself”. A bit later he says, “Some of you that are persecuting him are the very ones that took away from him and from us the knowledge of self.” He doesn’t say who he means by “you”, but he’s angry. He says, “You took our language, you took our culture, you took our minds”
At 07:48 he says he went to see the movie (“From Hebrews to Negroes”) with his wife and says, “It was well researched. The people who did it had a purpose. The purpose of those people to show us how we got from Hebrew to Negro.”
So he thinks there’s a lot of “knowledge” in the film? Does he agree with Black Hebrew Israelites theology? Rolling Stone says the movie espouse ideas in line with more extreme factions of the Black Hebrew Israelites, which have a long history of misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and especially antisemitism. Does Minister Farrakhan think there’s well-researched knowledge coming from people who hold Islam in contempt? Though he says “knowledge” probably 10 times in his talk he never says what facts in the film he found true, interesting or even new.
Again and again, he talks out and denounces a “you” in his sermon. At one point he says, “Why owners of the Nets? Why did you feel threatened. He didn't call you out by name. “So are his denunciations that of the owners of the Nets? No, because a few sentences later he says about the film, “there are things in there they you don't like, but there are many things that you've written about us that we don't like.” It’s obviously NOT the owners of the Nets he’s talking about here.
To the “you”, he says, you wanted [basketball stars] Kevin Durant and Lebron James to watch “as you were lynching Kyrie. You all better get the point.” Lynching him, i.e., criticizing him for telling his followers to watch an utter pile of B.S.
Then at 21:10 he directs his attention supposedly to the ADL (Anti-Defamation League). At that point he says about Kyrie, “He can look at the horror of the holocaust” and then he says furiously, “Why don't you come and look at the horror of what your parents did to black people?” Is he talking about parents of the ADL? Of course not. He’s talking about the Jews.
He’s angry at being personally rejected. He talks at length at the Jewish response to a three-volume work called “The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews”. The books claim that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade. It’s a claim widely refuted, for instance by Henry Louis Gates head of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard.
At 28:04 he says, “You don’t want to read ‘The Secret Relationship with [sic] Blacks and Jews’ that we financed, that we researched” and he spends time recounting a dinner he had in Chicago with several rabbis and a reporter around the time the first volume came out (1991). Farrakhan says a rabbi told him, “We have to watch you over a protracted period of time to see if you’ve changed.” He was told to renounce the “Secret Relationship” book. He repeats the trope that Jews control the media, (“You control much of the publishing industry”). He said the people at the dinner promised to clean up his (Farrakhan’s) image if he did what they wanted. He explained he refused the help, trusting instead to God.
At 33:23 he says, “Resist the devil and he will flee from you… They don't want to be shown up. They want to put fear in you. And they do have power to hurt us. And God has plenty of power to hurt them.” Who is “the devil” and who is the “they”. It’s pretty clear from what comes next that he’s talking about the Jews, for right afterwards he says “If you want our brother to come and sit with your rabbis and visit the Holocaust Museum. why not let some of our scholars come and come and sit with you because we know the Torah and we know the Talmud and we know your history.”
At 34:56 he says “Leave our people alone. Leave Kyrie alone… You still are an old, wicked slave master.”
(37:22) “We have never done to you and your people what you have done to us. We don't need to go see the holocaust. We feel your pain because we’re really human beings, but you don’t feel our pain cause to you a thousand blacks ain’t worth a fingernail of a Jewish man.”
He reflects on how some people did not like Kyrie’s initial apology and says (43:03), “How many of you would come and sit down with us and apologize us for the transatlantic slave trade?”
A few minutes later (48:34) he says I want to quote from scripture verse "resist the devil and he will flee from you.” He explains the definition of “resist’ and he then says, “For nearly 40 years I've withstood you everything you've said and done to hurt me and those with me. I'm here”
What is he talking about? What happened 40 years ago? That's when he infuriated Jews and other anti-racist people by saying Judaism was a "dirty religion" and by saying Hitler was a "great man" and that "when it's God who puts you in the ovens, it's forever."
After a number of religious cliches at 50:38 he confirms he’s still talking about Jews by saying, “you'll have all of them standing together and we all can pool of resources and be thankful for what we’ve been blessed to get by our association with members of the Jewish community, but we're not going to let you destroy us.”
He saw the “From Hebrews to Negroes” film and concluded it was “well-researched”. To him we Jews are the enemy, the devil, the slave masters, and our justified anger at what Ye and Kyrie have said amounts to a lynching. He brings up again and again the rejection decades ago of a slanderous book on the slave trade. What a vile tub of hate and resentment.
So who can lead the fight against this garbage? The ADL? No way. We cannot depend on the ADL to defend Jews from antisemitism. It’s too compromised by its opposition to progressive U.S. Black leaders and because of the ADL’s association with apartheid Israel. Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now should make the fight against antisemitism one of their key concerns. They should fight it by joining with other anti-racists to expose and defend against all kinds of hate.
The ADL’s criticism of Black leaders started in earnest in the late ‘60’s when it condemned SNCC (the civil rights era Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and continued as it criticized Andrew Young and Nelson Mandela. In 2016 the ADL made it clear that it would not work with the Black Lives Matter movement because of its criticism of Israel.
Emmaia Gelman, writing in the Boston Review, said, “For at least three decades the ADL had targeted civil rights groups.” This included organizations doing work against the apartheid system in South Africa. This was not widely known but it came out after the FBI had raided ADL offices in California finding and seizing troves of public government documents like drivers’ license information and confidential law enforcement reports that were not for public inspection. It was part of ADL surveillance files on thousands of Americans on the Left.
Also, there is the years long ADL program to train U.S. police by bringing them to Israel to work with their Israeli counterparts. Jewish Voice for Peace was able to discover that for over a decade and continuing during the height of the George Floyd anti-brutality movement, the ADL sponsored police exchanges were making U.S. police more “militarized”. In contact with Israeli police “they are encouraged to see themselves as combatants.” In 2019 the ADL “paused” the program. It’s unknown if the exchanges have restarted.
The ADL is compromised by its Zionism and its hypocrisy. The Jewish Left should lead the fight against antisemitism, not with its own ADL, but as part of a broad anti-racist coalition. Within all its concerns it should have groups specifically working to combat the haters of Jews.
Postscript: I urge you read this article in Jewish Currents. It’s about a group that calls itself Israel United in Christ. It’s an all-Black group that on November 20 circled the Barclay Center in Brooklyn in defense of Kyrie Irving.
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Postscript 2: Farrakhan publishes his own transcript