By Tingba Muhammad -Guest Columnist-

(FinalCall.com) – In the last few weeks a Jewish organization calling itself the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has amplified its attacks on the Nation of Islam.

According to its mission statement, the Montgomery, Alabama-based “civil rights” group claims to have been founded out of “sympath[y] with the plight of the poor and the powerless,” but they have long been hostile to the NOI and its leader, the greatest voice of the poor and powerless, The Hon. Minister Louis Farrakhan. The group has even attempted to use its influence within the law enforcement establishment to assign the label of “hate group” to the most influential and respected organization in the Black community.

The SPLC carries the mantle of “civil rights organization,” which has led many people to believe in its purported multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-religious makeup. But its operational leadership and finance base are entirely Jewish-Caucasian, which almost certainly explains why the SPLC has developed a special animus toward the millions of Black people who are supporters of Minister Farrakhan and members of the Nation of Islam.

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Led by its Jewish president Richard Cohen and founder Joseph Levin, the SPLC has joined with Abraham Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL), which has since the 1950s carried on a COINTELPRO campaign of hate and slander against the Nation of Islam, accusing the NOI of “anti-Semitism.” Recently revealed internal ADL documents quoted in The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 2, show their former leader Arnold Forster privately admitting before their racist campaign even began that “We have no documentable evidence of anti-Semitism on the part of the Temples of Islam movement or Elijah Muhammad.”

Despite the exposure of their underhanded motives, the Jews at the “Southern Poverty Law Center” have now renewed and intensified this ADL operation. But the SPLC has added a new dimension, adopting a tactic, as Jews, of publicly opposing the interreligious relationships developed by the Nation of Islam. And though the SPLC would appear to be operating far outside the realm of its stated purpose, it has targeted the NOI for its association with the Church of Scientology and the implementation of a technology developed by its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, for personal and organizational improvement. In two articles by staffer Leah Nelson, published under the banner of “HATEWATCH,” Messrs Cohen and Levin make a number of serious allegations that have placed the Jewish SPLC leadership in direct legal confrontation with the rights of the Muslim members of the Nation of Islam.

The Hate that SPLC Produced

As stated, the SPLC has for years schemed to affix the label “hate group” to the NOI. This is no small consideration: the so-called Patriot Act that Congress enacted in response to 9/11 created a “Terrorist Watch list” that subjects those listed to extra-judicial persecution. Such a list is being prepared for groups and individuals who challenge the policies of the American government, such as the illegal and unjust bombing of the African nation of Libya. If the SPLC’s own list of “hate groups” is ever adopted by government law-enforcement agencies–which SPLC is actively trying to accomplish–it would instantly put every individual Muslim in the Nation of Islam in a position of legal jeopardy far and away above that which Blacks already face in America. These “hate crime laws,” which were ostensibly passed to cripple the Ku Klux Klan and others, are about to be applied in full force against the Nation of Islam. And the “Southern Poverty Law Center,” under the direction of Mr. Cohen and Mr. Levin, is behind this movement.

The SPLC boasts that its representatives “communicate regularly with law enforcement agencies [and] teach officers how to recognize hate groups, symbols and activity; the threat potential of specific groups; and how to respond to hate group activity.” Former FBI Special Agent Tyrone Powers warns, “Groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center enjoy unusual and extraordinary access to FBI operations. They are considered ‘reliable sources’ by their friends at the FBI, which is all the FBI needs to trigger investigations which include Hoover-like harassment of Black people. Wiretaps, the bugging of homes and cars, which are all illegal according to the 4th Amendment, can all be justified by the government.”

Church of Scientology

Messrs Cohen and Levin, again, stepping far, far outside the scope of their group’s stated mission, have determined that the association of the Nation of Islam with the Church of Scientology somehow requires the SPLC’s formal Jewish attention. They complain that “Scientology’s followers, who include several well-known celebrities and other wealthy people, are overwhelmingly White…and its founder [L. Ron Hubbard] reportedly was a racist who long defended South African apartheid.”

For those who have read the Nation of Islam’s research volumes titled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews and the companion volume Jews Selling Blacks, Cohen and Levin have made a woefully pretentious pronouncement–especially for Jews based in the Deep South, as they are. The unspoken assumption of their anti-Church of Scientology harangue is that Jews, being historically free of the blemish of “racism,” reserve for themselves the moral authority to designate who is and is not racist and to pick and choose which interracial associations between other people are proper and permitted. We, the historical victims of Talmud-invented, Curse-of-Ham racism, apparently lack the intuitive powers of reason and the ability to independently make a judgment on our own behalf. Only the Caucasian Jews are so qualified and authorized. This arrogance-soaked assertion by Mr. Cohen and Mr. Levin, as obnoxious as it is, has nonetheless raised a standard of “guilt by association” that if applied to the relationship between Blacks and their “best friends,” the Jews–in the same way they have applied it to the Scientologists and the NOI–might render the Jews utterly friendless in the Black community.

Levin and Cohen should start with a visit to their own Jewish American history books–wherein they would become acquainted with the Jewish people’s rapid emergence in the slave South. Though they were a tiny minority everywhere they settled, Jews were elected mayors in many of the most notoriously racist cities on earth, including where the SPLC is headquartered–Montgomery, Alabama. They were voted into these critical positions by White racist Gentiles, not because they intended to reform the racist system of slavery and apartheid, but because they, as Jews, were seen as its most effective enforcers. And they never disappointed. Mordecai Moses served three terms as mayor of Montgomery, the city in which Mrs. Rosa Parks was legally thrown off a city bus, sparking the Civil Rights Movement. Moses was depicted as the candidate of “the White men of Montgomery,” while his opponent was denigrated as a friend of the Blacks. Moses won a landslide victory.

Jewish merchants dominated the Main Streets of Montgomery, Alabama, and many other towns and cities in the South. The Jewish immigrant Lehman Brothers opened a cotton brokerage store in Montgomery directly opposite the town’s main slave-trading auction block. Mayer Lehman was appointed by the governor to be in charge of ALL the cotton in the state–and thus ALL of the Black slaves held captive on its vast cotton plantations.

Mr. Cohen and Mr. Levin have not told the Black people who support the Southern Poverty Law Center exactly how so many Blacks in the South became so impoverished. If they consulted the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901), they would learn: “In fact, the cotton-plantations in many parts of the South were wholly in the hands of the Jews, and as a consequence slavery found its advocates among them.” And there is solid proof that Jewish families named Levin and Cohen openly sold Black people for profit. According to their slave sale advertisement, the Levin family sold “22 Likely Negroes” between the ages of 2 and 60 at a public auction. Not to be outdone–or outbid–Jacob Cohen & Son were selling a “valuable family of Field Negroes.” Cohen was selling whole plantations, one with “good negro houses to accommodate comfortably eighty negros.”

This activity brought the Jewish cotton planters, merchants, and slave-traders so much wealth at the expense of Black suffering that the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life admitted that in the formative years of the city of Montgomery, the “important banks and institutions were owned and operated by Jews.” That included the Moses Brothers Bank, which held the savings of “hundreds of negro depositors” amounting to as much as half a million dollars. It closed one day and all the savings of these Montgomery Blacks were simply “swept away.” They, the Black victims of the Moses Brothers’ “business law,” were left a century later with Mr. Cohen and Mr. Levin’s so-called Southern “poverty law.”

The racist statements that Mr. Cohen and Mr. Levin have attributed to L. Ron Hubbard, even if ever proven to have been uttered, and even if Mr. Hubbard uttered such views every day, all day, forever and ever, would hardly challenge in actual DEED the racist behaviors of the Jews in the very location the SPLC currently operates. In fact, given the aforementioned books released by The Hon. Minister Louis Farrakhan, the Jews of America would have to vie with the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan for the title of “group that has done more harm to Black progress in America.” And if you believe this to be a hyperbolic overstatement, consider that it was the most prominent Jew in the South, Judah P. Benjamin, who actually financed the original Ku Klux Klan! Without his money to buy guns and ropes and sheets and hoods, the KKK might never have gotten organized.

The historical criteria that the SPLC Jews have established for the NOI and Minister Farrakhan and their relationship with the Church of Scientology must now be applied to the SPLC itself. The Black board members, staffers and employees must confront the White racists that lead them and demand an immediate change in their reckless and slanderous policy. Be advised that The Hon. Min. Louis Farrakhan is a divinely guided Messenger to the Black Nation in the West (America). He and we who follow his stellar and long-proven advice will freely associate with anyone and any organization that he and we may choose–notwithstanding the SPLC’s arrogant misguidance. If Mr. Hubbard has made racist remarks, and thus should be avoided by Blacks, what then should be Black’s relationship with Jews?

Whereas you SPLC Blacks have chosen to ally yourselves with that very same group of poverty-makers that Jesus himself condemned, Black people en masse have chosen God’s divine, independent redemption. Insist that your Jewish SPLC leadership follow your organization’s original mission, namely, to use the courts to relieve the masses of Black people of the seemingly intractable poverty they suffer. Then remind Joseph Levin and Richard Cohen how exactly we came to be so impoverished, and how exactly they came to be so rich.

(Tingba Muhammad is a citizen of the Nation of Islam. For more information on this topic, visit http://www.noi.org/hrd.)