“We take Allah’s colour, Surely Allah is Best At Colouring”—Holy Qur’an 2:138
“Seek the LORD while He may be found; call on Him while He is near. Let the wicked man forsake his own way and the unrighteous man his own thoughts; let him return to the LORD, that He may have compassion, and to our God, for He will freely pardon. For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” —Isaiah 55:6-9
It is a gift of wisdom to realize how tremendous an impact our perspective has on the outcomes produced throughout our life’s journey.
Farrakhan: Black America’s Mercy Seat
My teacher, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, in a powerful message, entitled Add It Up, which was delivered in the city of Atlanta, Georgia, on April 28, 1990, stated powerfully:
“I am to Black People what the Pope is to White People.”
This is a powerful statement that has been evidenced especially when we consider the Minister’s long history and demonstrated ability of coming to the aid and defense of Black people, both as a group and in individual instances when it becomes clear that the White power structure has targeted for destruction those prominent members of the Black community.
Minister Farrakhan has been the highest spiritual authority within Black America for decades now. He is beloved and sought out for counsel and guidance from the widest possible cross-section of Black America. Think about it. I know of no other man whose sphere of influence is as broad; some examples include how the Minister has received the admiration of both Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Crips gang co-founder Stan Tookie Williams. These two Black brothers, being as polar opposites within Black America, are easy examples of the enormous span of the salvific influence of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan.
The Minister loves Brother Kanye, now known as Ye. And he loves those within the Black community who have taken issue with some of Ye’s statements that are offensive to many within the Black community.
The leader of world Christianity is called The Pope; within this title are also the appellations: The Pontiff, The Vicar of Christ, The Patriarch of the West and The Servant of The Servants of God. The history of the rebuilding of the Nation of Islam is filled with examples of Minister Farrakhan occupying the role as spiritual father to Black America, a man who has been and is a real “pontiff” or “bridge” to unity and a real “vicar of Christ” who is the door to access to the Mercy of God.
The Minister, being like the Pope of Black America, views the young leaders and artists as a father views his sons and daughters. Good fathers hate to see their children arguing and fighting against one another. So, the Minister is always found giving fatherly wisdom, counsel and encouragement. He has helped important elements within the Black community find the path to reconciliation. During the historic Million Man March the Minister baptized the nearly two million men in the “Eight Steps of Atonement.”
And the spiritual leadership and authority of Minister Farrakhan is wielded by him in his defense of Black people. Professor Andre C. Willis has said of the Minister:
“There is simply no Black person in the world that has—over so many years—been as consistent, as unrestricted, and as forthright in defending the humanity of Black people throughout the world against its attackers.”
The Minister has never taken as an accepted use of his divine authority, the condemnation of Black people. The Bible, in Hebrews 12:6, states “For the Lord disciplines the one He loves,” and as a loving father the Minister has chastised us for our wrongs and sins against one another. However, the Minister never disciplines or chastises out of an intention to condemn, judge, or embarrass.
Additionally, one Jewish critic of Minister Farrakhan, Daniel Pipes has noted:
“… a well-established pattern of African-Americans who, finding their reputation in tatters, turn to the Nation of Islam, which then provides them with solace and help.”
Ye’s Words vs. Actions of White Supremacy
When we awaken to realize that Minister Farrakhan is sitting in the seat of His Teacher, the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and that His seat is the Mercy Seat, we understand why The Final Call’s previous headline acknowledged Ye’s great courage in speaking certain powerful and controversial truths. (See The Final Call Vol. 42 No. 4)
There are so many real and present existential dangers to Black Life in America, we as a people cannot continue to afford the luxury of disunity. Every fault line of inter-group division must be fought against as an existential threat to our very survival as a people!
Ye has said hurtful things to his own people. But we must not allow his mis-guided statements about slavery, George Floyd, etc. cause us to take a hostile posture towards a fellow member of the Black community. Ye is our brother, which means he is a member of the Black family. The glue that keeps family together, the proverbial blessed “ties that bind” us together as a people must and needs to be, our love of and for one another. Love is according to the Bible:
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs. Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”—1 Corinthians 13:4-7
When we love one another, we follow that old colloquial truism that state “punish in private and praise in public.” The work of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and His National Representative the Honorable Min. Louis Farrakhan can be summarized as the work to establish among us the pre-dominance of love and respect as the guiding principle for life.
Let’s take a moment and re-focus. Let’s ask ourselves a very important question. Is Ye being “cancelled” because of intemperate statements about slavery and George Floyd? Did his intensive statements that offended the Black community inspire his “cancellation?” The answer to these question is an emphatic NO!
Black America should not be involved in the “cancellation” of one of our own, to the delight of the White Power Structure and its Jewish leadership. We ought to remember that Ye’s words pale in comparison to the actions of those who have been the enemies of Black life in America.
Pause to reflect on what was done to us by our slavemasters:
“The slaves had been stripped of their status, their names, their families and friends, and their customs and culture. They were surrounded by fear, distrust, and sometimes hatred. No wonder it was commonplace for newly arrived slaves to try to run away or sink into a deep, sometimes suicidal depression. They stood naked to misery, not knowing what would happen to them.” (Slavery In America by Dorothy and Carl Schneider p. 78)
Jesus & The Origin of Anti-Semitism
What our enemies have done to enslave us, mis-educate us, lynch us, castrate us, rape us, and poison us is far worse in the eyes of Allah (God) than any statements made by any member of the Black family.
The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad did not want us to “cancel” one another. He preached “separation” as opposed to “integration.” Separation, He said, is the divine solution to the problem of Black suffering in America. Separation is the “cancellation” we should be pursuing. The separation of the Black people of America into a land of our own is the ultimate “cancellation” of the power of our enemies to rule over us.
Ye is being “cancelled” because he has been labeled as an anti-Semite. It may surprise many to learn that the Gospels have been identified as the root cause of anti-Semitism. Yes, the life story of Jesus as recorded within the Bible’s New Testament is blamed for the birth of anti-Semitism in the world. According to Jewish Virtual Encyclopedia contributor Charles Patterson:
“The gospel story, which has generated more anti-Semitism than the sum of all the other anti-Semitic writings ever written, created the climate in Christian Europe that led to the Holocaust. Long before the rise of Adolf Hitler, the gospel story about the life and death of Jesus had poisoned the bloodstream of European civilization.”
Infamous Farrakhan critic, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman blames the church as the problem of anti-Semitism:
“For almost twenty centuries . . . the church was the archenemy of the Jews—our most powerful and relentless oppressor and the worlds’ greatest force for the dissemination of Anti-Semitic beliefs and the instigation of the acts of hatred. Many of the same people who operated the gas chambers worshiped in Christian churches on Sunday … . The question of the complicity of the church in the murder of the Jews is a living one. We must understand the truths of our history.”
Ye’s criticisms of the Jewish control of the Black voice should be evaluated in the light of history. To do this, it is important to know that what Ye has said of Jewish criticism pales in comparison to what Jewish scholars, historians and Rabbis have documented in religious texts, books, lectures and peer reviewed academic journal articles.
Consider the following sample excerpts from the footnotes/sources The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.
According to The Jewish Encyclopedia:
“[T]he 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.” –Jewish Encyclopedia
According to Dr. Seymour Liebman:
“They came with ships carrying African blacks to be sold as slaves. The traffic in slaves was a royal monopoly, and the Jews were often appointed as agents for the Crown in their sale. … [They] were the largest ship chandlers in the entire Caribbean region, where the shipping business was mainly a Jewish enterprise. … The ships were not only owned by Jews, but were manned by Jewish crews and sailed under the command of Jewish captains.”
And Dr. Abraham J. Peck has explained:
“The first two centuries of the Black-Jewish encounter in America were highlighted by a fairly extensive record of Jewish slave-holding. Indeed, during the colonial period, in the small Jewish community of the time, almost every Jewish household of any form, North or South, possessed at least one slave.”
According to Dr. Cecil Roth:
“The Jews of the Joden Savanne [Surinam] were also foremost in the suppression of the successive negro revolts, from 1690 to 1722: these as a matter of fact were largely directed against them, as being the greatest slave-holders of the region.”
It is outrageous that Jesus and his life story would be blamed for anti-Semitism. It is outrageous that Blacks who simply point out what has been well-documented by Jewish scholars, Rabbis and historians as their involvement in the Black Holocaust would be falsely labeled as anti-Semites. It is outrageous that we would be willing to cancel Ye, while we see the enemy attacking him. None of us in the Black community should be celebrating the economic demise of our brother.
Ye’s words pale in comparison to what our adversaries have actually done to us, that we are still suffering from; if there is any canceling to be done, it is no doubt the need to cancel our sycophantic forgiving our oppressors while we fight our own people. The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has demonstrated the way of mercy. We should adopt his way, for it is the path of unity, the path will secure for us as a people the perpetual favor of Allah (God).
Demetric Muhammad is a Memphis-based author and student minister in the Nation of Islam and a member of the Nation of Islam Research Group. Follow him on Twitter @BrotherDemetric. Read more at www.researchminister.com.
