Black Leaders Who Hate America by John Perazzo FrontPageMagazine.com | October 30, 2001

WE HAVE LEARNED a great deal about the American character since the September 11 atrocities, as people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds have nobly rallied to the common cause of helping the immediate victims and supporting our government’s efforts to avert future attacks against our nation. That being said, however, a most unpleasant reality has also become painfully obvious: Those individuals who are currently recognized as the pre-eminent civil rights leaders of our day loathe our country every bit as deeply as the hate-filled Islamic fanatics who advocate "Death to America" from the streets of Islamabad, Teheran, Kabul, or Jakarta. This is by no means a matter of opinion; it is undeniable, evidenced by virtually every word these "leaders" have publicly uttered for thirty years. Indeed their hatred of America is nothing new, but stands in particularly stark relief against the background of current events.

Consider Louis Farrakhan, probably the most influential "civil rights" figure in contemporary America. He attracts enormous, standing-room-only crowds wherever he speaks, as exemplified when a 1992 lecture he gave in Atlanta actually outdrew a World Series game played there that same night. Three years later, of course, his "Million Man March" drew several hundred thousand attendees. Sadly the legions in attendance were no strangers to his long, well-documented history of venom-laced references to the "white devils" and Jewish "bloodsuckers" who purportedly decimate the black community from coast to coast.

In the wake of the unspeakable grief spawned by the September 11 mass murders, this same Louis Farrakhan has seen fit to charge that America has insufficient proof of bin Laden’s and al-Qaida’s culpability. "They [American government officials] have lied before," says the Nation of Islam kingpin, "and there’s no guarantee they’re not lying now." His next logical leap, of course, was to assert that if bin Laden is not to blame, then our military forces have no legitimate "reason to fight." Presumably neither bin Laden’s smug assurance that airliners would continue to "rain" down upon American cities, nor his advice that Muslims in the US should avoid airplanes and skyscrapers for the foreseeable future, nor his well-established involvement in past atrocities against our nation, arouse any suspicions in Mr. Farrakhan’s ostensibly fertile mind.

Not surprisingly Farrakhan also ascribes anti-American sentiment overseas to what he calls a flawed foreign policy that steadfastly supports Israel, the land he presumably deems the birthplace of the many "bloodsuckers" he so detests. Curiously he does not mention that Israel, as Islamic professor M.A. Muqtedar Khan points out, in fact "treats its Arab citizens with greater respect and dignity than most Arab nations treat their [own] citizens." Nor does Farrakhan mention that no nation on earth has worked harder to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord than the US. Neither does he seem impressed by the fact that America, unlike every Muslim country except Jordan, allows Palestinians to settle freely within its borders and become full-fledged citizens. e did not, incidentally, call for a reevaluation of the Taliban foreign policy of blowing up buildings, ships, and flying airliners into skyscrapers with the sole intent of killing thousands of civilians. GHppppp

The hallmark of Farrakhan’s career is his relentless denunciation of the US as a nation that purportedly oppresses minorities. Oppression elsewhere in the world, however, has never troubled him in the least. Indeed in 1996 and again the following year, he went on his celebrated "World Friendship Tours" during which he exchanged pleasantries with government leaders in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Sudan – five of the most politically oppressive nations on earth, and all of which are on the State Department’s list of nations that support terrorism. Particularly noteworthy was his visit as an honored guest of Sudan’s Islamic fundamentalist government, which, to this very day, presides over the brutal exploitation of many thousands of black slaves. But such details don’t ruffle the feathers of our civil rights leaders. Only American transgressions bother them. Thus Farrakhan, like Jesse Jackson and Randall Robinson and the NAACP, have uniformly turned a deaf ear to the American Anti-Slavery Group’s oft-repeated pleas for help in alerting the world to the horrors of Africa’s ongoing slavery.

Not to be outdone by Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson has also seen fit to criticize the US for its handling of the current crisis. Notwithstanding America’s laudable effort to drop food to Afghan refugees, Jackson complains that we are not sending enough. No matter how earnestly our country tries to do the right thing, the effort always falls far short of what this self-anointed moral compass deems sufficient. By contrast, Jackson has not once criticized bin Laden’s supporters for having set fire to some of those food deliveries, nor reproached Taliban leaders for falsely telling the Afghan people that the food is actually poisoned. Neither has he directed any unkind words to the Taliban militias that have occupied a World Food Program warehouse in Kabul and stolen food and medicine – the type of actions that have prompted the French aid group "Doctors Without Borders" to despairingly suspend their operations in some Afghan cities. To Mr. Jackson, the only failings worth mentioning are America’s.

The spotlight is what Jackson craves most, even if its hot beam compromises America’s ability to systematically dismantle the latticework of terrorist cells scattered across the globe. Even after President Bush had made it clear that he would not negotiate with the Taliban, Jackson stood before news reporters and announced that he himself was contemplating a trip to Kabul, purportedly at the invitation of Taliban leaders, to negotiate a "peaceful resolution" to bin Ladin’s mass murder. After reporters told Jackson that the Taliban denied having extended any such invitation, he backpedaled and pathetically asserted that in the final analysis, it really didn’t matter who had made the first overture, so long as the "peace process" could be set in motion.

In short, we are confronted with the inescapably plain fact that, in this instance, the Taliban butchers of Afghanistan were actually more truthful than Jesse Jackson. Put another way, Jackson’s tale was less believable than that of a regime whose henchmen have presided over some of the most egregious abuses of human rights in living memory.

This astonishing realization signals that now would be a very good time for all Americans, black and white alike, to demand that their "civil rights leaders" be worthier of that title than are the self-congratulating, anti-American, moral degenerates who currently march under that righteous-sounding banner. Year after year these activists have metaphorically urinated upon the reputation of our great, albeit imperfect, nation. At every turn, they have claimed to see raw bigotry baring its fearsome fangs in a nation they depict as a veritable snake pit of racist vipers. And alas, through sheer repetition over many years, they succeeded in convincing millions of Americans that our country offers little inspiration for pride – in light of its purportedly racist national character. But let us duly take note: In the abominations of September 11, we all saw, to our horror, what real racists are.

-- Anonymous, October 30, 2001