Obama and Farrakhan

A veritable Krakatoa of anti-Semitism is erupting across America, with little if any reference to the nation’s leading anti-Semite, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. As recently noted, 1984 presidential candidate Jesse Jackson apologized for calling Jews “hymies,” but refused to denounce Farrakhan. The Nation of Islam boss also has a history with the composite character David Garrow profiled in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.

In 2005, a year after his historic performance at the Democratic National Convention, a smiling Obama was photographed with Farrakhan, looking pleased to be in the politician’s company. The meeting wasn’t his first association with the Nation of Islam, and prominent members.

In Dreams from My Father, young Barry gathers books from authors such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W.E.B. DuBois. He finds “all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels,” and “only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different.”

In Los Angeles, Barry and his friend Ray meet a tall gaunt man named Malik, a follower of the Nation of Islam. As they chat, a bystander says “Malcolm tells it like it is, no doubt about it,” but readers learn nothing about Nation of Islam doctrine. In “Nationalism of Fools,” a 1985 essay in the Village Voice, the great Stanley Crouch described it in fine style:

The Nation of Islam offered a rageful revision that would soon have far more assenters than converts. Though it seemed at first only a fanatical cult committed to a bizarre version of Islam, Elijah Muhammad’s homemade Nation was far from an aberration.

Where others explained the world’s problems with complex theories ranging from economic exploitation to sexism, Muhammad simply pinned the tail on the white man. In his view, black integrationists were only asking for membership in hell, since the white man was a devil “grafted” from black people in an evil genetic experiment by a mad, pumpkin-headed scientist named Yacub. That experiment took place 6000 years ago. Now the white man was doomed, sentenced to destruction by Allah.

In the context of prevailing media images and public racial struggle, this was all new. Here were Negroes who considered themselves the chosen people. They proclaimed that the black man was the original man, the angel, and that since the first devils to roll off Yacub’s assembly line were the Jews, the idea of their being the chosen was a lot of baloney.

Neither [Martin Luther] King nor any reputable people doing serious work would have anything to do with the Nation of Islam. It was too racist and too much of an intellectual embarrassment.

This was not a one-off. In television appearances, Crouch would challenge people to raise their hand if they believed that “white people,” a group including Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Joan of Arc and such, were the result of Yacub’s experiment. Farrakhan is good with it, and also on record that Hitler was a “very great man.”

Despite Farrakhan’s long record of Jew-hatred, Obama was pleased to pose with him in 2005. In 2008, Obama rejected Farrakhan’s endorsement, but Hillary Clinton said that wasn’t good enough. That same year, Obama’s church gave Farrakhan an award, prompting Obama to  “decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan.”

The composite character had many opportunities to issue such statements in the past, including his 1995 book. He only spoke out when Farrakhan became a campaign issue, and the candidate condemned only his anti-Semitic “statements,” not the vile racist doctrines that Crouch called out so clearly. When it came to the Jews, Farrakhan was not backing off.

“They stole land in Palestine,” Farrakhan said in 2010. “And this Synagogue of Satan knows that the end of their time of rule is up.” In 2017, Farrakhan said Jews “are in fact Satan,” the “enemy of God and the enemy of the righteous.” In 2018, Farrakhan claimed he was not an anti-Semite but only “anti-termite.” And so on, but clear condemnations of this bigot from the former president are hard to find.

After the 10/7 Hamas attack, which David Horowitz calls “the worst massacre of Jews for being Jews since the Holocaust,” thousands of anti-Semites take to the streets to cheer on the Hamas terrorists. For all but the willfully blind, their chant of “from the river to the sea,” is code for the extermination of Jews.

After the 10/7 massacre, Obama decried the “occupation” of Palestine, which Farrakhan claims the Jews “stole,” and the former president failed to condemn anti-Semitism in his own party. On this issue, Obama and Farrakhan may be as close and collegial as they were in that 2005 photo.