New blood – and blood libels – at the Women’s March

There are two Women’s Marches. Or, rather, many. One – the most important one, and the one that got most of the media attention – was held in Washington, D.C., on January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump, whose unexpected election to the presidency over someone who had been expected to become the nation’s first female president had been regarded by many of the marchers as an outrage. On the same day, over 400 other Women’s Marches took place in cities around the country – and more than 150 marches took place in 81 countries around the world. The number of participants was staggering – perhaps over five million in the U.S. alone.

As it happens, moreover, the group that organized these events also goes by the name of Women’s March. Among its national co-chairs was Linda Sarsour, a previously obscure Palestinian-American activist who gave a high-profile speech at the Washington march that made her internationally famous and whom we’ve written about frequently on this site. Sarsour – a sometime director of the Arab American Association of New York who belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America and helped found Black Lives Matter – proved to be that most paradoxical of creatures: a self-declared feminist who supports jihad and sharia law and wears a hijab, a symbol of female subordination under Islam. She felt sorry for Saddam Hussein when he was captured by the U.S. and she won an “American Muslim of the Year” award from terrorist-linked CAIR. While smearing ex-Muslims and critics of Muslims such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sarsour has been chummy with Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Louis Farrakhan, one of America’s most prominent anti-Semites.

Indeed, after Sarsour rocketed to fame, it became clear she, too, had – shall we say – problematic attitudes toward the Jewish people. She’s big on the BDS movement – the campaign to boycott Israel, divest in its companies, and impose sanctions on Israeli trade. She’s said that “nothing is creepier than Zionism.” And she wasn’t the only leader of the Women’s March whose attitudes toward Jews left something to be desired. Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, the board was rife with Jew-haters. As this fact became well-known, it caused what the Washington Free Beacon described as a “year of turmoil” for the organization. The Women’s March experienced some bad PR after co-chair Tamika Mallory blamed Jews for the slave trade and said that Jews controlled all the world’s money. Like Sarsour, moreover, Mallory was friends with Farrakhan, whom she described as the “Greatest of All Time.” Another board member, Bob Bland, joined Mallory in defending Farrakhan on TV after one of the Nation of Islam leader’s occasional outbursts of passionate Jew-hatred.

In August, in an apparent effort to silence concern about antisemitism in the Women’s March hierarchy, Sarsour, Mallory, and Bland all stepped down from the organization’s board. But it doesn’t look as if this move will necessarily improve the image of the Women’s March. Of the 16 new individuals added to the group’s board, one, Zahra Billoo, who is executive director of the Bay Area chapter of CAIR, has called Israel a “terrorist state” and equated it to ISIS, while another, Palestinian-American activist Samia Assed, has questioned Israel’s right to exist. It seems as if the people who run the Women’s March just can’t keep Jew-haters out of their ranks. Somehow we wouldn’t be surprised if, in the fullness of time, it turns out that at least a few of the other 14 new board members have a distaste for the Hebrew folk as well.

Posted on September 24, 2019September 18, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

Pfleger’s friends

On June 22, readers of the Chicago Sun-Times were treated to a report by columnist Michael Sneed about “activist priest” Father Michael Pfleger, a well-known figure in the Windy City. In May, at his invitation, Louis Farrakan had preached from Pfleger’s pulpit at St. Sabina Church. Unsurprisingly, the appearance had not gone down well with some members of the Jewish community, and now, as a result, wrote Sneed, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO), sponsor of a planned “concert for peace” at the church by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, had canceled the event – or maybe just postponed it; the CSO Association’s president, Jeff Alexander, said he wanted to “give things time to settle down, give everyone some space, and try to do it next season after everything gets resolved.” It wasn’t clear exactly what any of that might mean. In any event, Pfleger was not happy. The concert, he said, had been intended “to draw people together.” It was meant to be “a celebration of love and unity and peace” by “people from ZIP codes all over the city.” At a time when America is “a divided nation,” said the priest, he had wanted to do something to “unif[y] the human family.” One sermon by Farrakhan, he lamented, and “44 years of my ministry was put aside.”

Pfleger spoke as if his invitation to Farrakhan had been a one-off. And Sneed, for whatever reason, chose not to provide his readers with information that might have helped them to recognize that picture of the situation as disingenuous. In fact, as we noted here in April 2017, Pfleger and Farrakhan – who has called Judaism a “gutter religion,” urged his supporters to murder white people, and told Jews that “when it’s God who puts you in the ovens, it’s forever” – are old pals. Pfleger himself has described them as “very close friends,” referred to Farrakhan as his “Brother,” and praised Farrakhan for “his Prophetic and courageous Voice.” They’ve dined at each other’s homes “many, many times.” When he allowed Farrakhan to preach from his pulpit in May, it wasn’t the first time; it was at least the fourth.

Pfleger’s affection for Farrakhan isn’t some fluke. He’s also chummy with Jeremiah Wright, the Obamas’ notorious former minister who accused white scientists of creating HIV to kill blacks and summed up 9/11 by saying that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” He’s buddy-buddy with Al Sharpton. Shortly after 9/11, he let Harry Belafonte take to his pulpit at St. Sabina to blame the terrorist attack on the U.S. itself. On one of the anniversaries of 9/11, the preacher at St. Sabina was an imam named Kareen Irfan, who has defended and befriended terrorists. Never had Pfleger expressed regret for his association with any of these people. Once, when challenged on TV about his friendships with Farrakhan and Wright, Pfleger didn’t get defensive but went on the attack: “I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit back while you tear down Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright. How dare you. How dare you. How dare you seek to reduce Jeremiah Wright, who’s one of the greatest Biblical scholars this nation has, to a 30-second sound bite and try to demonize him and trivialize him. You cannot do that.”

Given all this, it’s rather puzzling that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Yo-Yo Ma agreed to the “concert for peace” in the first place. Or is it? The very fact that Alexander spoke of “giv[ing] things time to settle down” suggests that the CSO was less concerned about being associated with a despicable piece of work like Pfleger than about the bad publicity. Alexander’s remarks to the contrary, there’s no way to “resolve” this ugly situation and make everything nice; if one thing’s clear from Pfleger’s vile history, he’s one leopard who’s not about to change his spots.

Posted on July 23, 2019July 3, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

Twitter’s double standards

Two weeks ago we reported here that we’ve been banned from Twitter and been given no coherent reason for it. Last week we served up a list of prominent people with strong opinions who’ve also been banned for reasons that remain obscure.

To compare this list of people – each of whom had a great many followers and whose views fall well within the mainstream of American and Western opinion – to a roster of people who’ve kept their Twitter accounts is…what shall we say? Is it puzzling? Or is it illuminating?

Take the British activist and journalist Tommy Robinson, who in addition to being kicked off of Twitter last year was removed from Facebook recently – one day, in fact, after his BBC exposé Panodrama was posted there.

Robinson is a vigorous critic of Islamic ideology. But he is no bigot. He consistently makes distinctions between an ideology that calls for the murder of Jews, gays, and apostates and hundreds of millions of people who, while calling themselves Muslims, somehow managing to distance themselves from those monstrous teachings.

Robinson’s allies, colleagues, and supporters, moreover, come from a wide range of backgrounds. His closest friends include black Caribbeans and gay people. In any event – and here’s the big point – he doesn’t have anything remotely resembling the comprehensive record of hate that has been compiled by, say, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Farrakhan, as everyone knows, has described Jews as “satanic.” He has called them “termites.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a black scholar who heads the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard, has characterized a book by Farrakhan as “the bible of new anti-Semitism.” Of all the most famous people in America, Farrakhan is one of the vilest.

Yet although Facebook banned him in May, he still has a Twitter account that has never been even temporarily suspended.

He’s far from alone. Also still tweeting away is Linda Sarsour, who claims to be a feminist but is a bosom buddy of Farrakhan, a constant wearer of hijab, and a passionate supporter of sharia law.

Also still on Twitter is BAMN, the violence-prone Trotskyite organization that both the FBI and the Defense Department consider to be a terrorist group. BAMN was behind the riot that prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at Berkeley in 2017. But while Twitter has banned Yiannopoulos, who never encouraged violence in his life, BAMN is a blue-check member (a status reserved for public figures and established organizations).

Also surviving perfectly well on Twitter, thank you very much, is that gang of vandals and thugs known as New York City Antifa. Ditto Sarah Jeong, the New York Times board member who gained notoriety last year for her prodigious use of Twitter to savage white people. And the list goes on.

Of course, allowing some perfectly horrible people to stay on Twitter is defensible. Cuba’s dictator, Raúl Castro, and dictator-in-waiting, Miguel Díaz-Canel, have blue-check accounts. But fine – it’s useful to know what’s on their nefarious minds.

Some Twitter bans are arguably defensible, too. The service has banned a number of groups and individuals on the right that practice and encourage violence. Yet at the same time it’s left any number of violent, hate-spewing users on the left entirely untouched. And that’s where the question of inequality comes in.

More next week.

Posted on June 18, 2019June 2, 2019 by usefulstooges 3

Capitol Hill’s newest anti-Semite

Among the new Members of the U.S. Congress elected on November 6 is one Ilhan Omar. Previously, she was a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives. She was the first Somali American legislator to hold elective office in the U.S. She is now the first Somali American in the U.S. House. She and Rashida Tlaib, who was elected to the House on the same day, are the first Muslim women in the U.S. Congress. Representing a district that includes Minneapolis and several smaller cities, Omar will succeed another Muslim, Keith Ellison, who left Congress in order to run for State Attorney General of Minnesota, a race that he, too, won.

Now 37 years old, Omar denied during her campaign – specifically, at an August debate at a synagogue – that she supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. This was not a minor question, since her district, the fifth, has a sizable Jewish population. It is also by far the most Democratic district in the state, and has not voted for a Republican since 1960.

Since her election, however, Omar has come out of the BDS closet. After the news came out, Avi Olitzsky, the rabbi who sponsored that August debate, expressed the hope that he could “have a dialogue with her” and thus clarify her stance. Ah, dialogue. Credulous persons who have had pleasant encounters with this or that individual Muslim are often shocked to find that that individual actually believes certain things that don’t seem terribly pleasant at all. Their initial response is often to assume that there has to be some kind of misunderstanding, because, after all, the Muslim in question seems so charming. Surely a brief friendly talk will clear it all up.

Such, alas, is the way in which many Westerners are forced to confront the largely dark reality of Islamic belief.

To be sure, it’s not as if Omar entirely hid her contempt for Israel during the election campaign. In July, Haaretz reported that she had called Israel’s government an “apartheid” regime. She had not explicitly given a thumbs-up to BDS, but she’d opposed a proposed state law banning BDS. In 2012, Omar wrote a tweet in which she expressed the hope that “Allah” would “awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

A halfway sensible observer might have guessed from all this that Omar is, indeed, a BDS advocate, but all too many voters – especially, perhaps, in places like Minnesota, which is known for its “niceness” – are eager to dismiss such suspicions as the product of subconscious Islamophobia, for, after all, such a lovely young woman could not possibly hold such ugly thoughts. Despite the evidence that Omar is, in fact, a nasty piece of work, the national media ran predictably glowing profiles of her, with a particularly hagiographic one appearing in The New Yorker. On Election Day, Omar won her House seat with a remarkable 78% of the vote.

This, then, is the new representative whom the voters of Minneapolis and environs have chosen to send to Washington, and will have to live with for the next two years. Perhaps her constituents can take comfort in the fact that, so far anyway, there is no sign that she is any more virulent an anti-Semite than Ellison, whose longtime ties with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, perhaps the nation’s most prominent Jew-hater, did not prevent him from being re-elected to Congress five times.

Posted on December 4, 2018November 17, 2018 by usefulstooges 2

Ben & Jerry….& Linda Sarsour?

Who doesn’t know about Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream company founded in Burlington, Vermont – that’s right, Bernie Sanders country – in 1978? Who doesn’t know that Ben & Jerry’s is not just political – goodness knows that plenty of companies nowadays wear their politics on their sleeves – but in-your-face political, aggressively political, Vermont political?

The company was founded by two old hippies, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who have given politically tinged names to their ice cream flavors for years. They’ve waded into the British-Irish conflict, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a struggle in Australia over dangers purported posed by government policies to the Great Barrier Reef. In 2016, they created a flavor in support of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. That same year, both Ben and Jerry were arrested at protests in front of the U.S. Capitol. Earlier this year, they announced support for Afghan asylum seekers in Sweden.

Their latest treat is something called Pecan Resist. As in “We can resist.” It is meant to be part of “a campaign to lick injustice and champion those fighting to create a more just and equitable nation for us all.” Get it? You can lick injustice just like you lick an ice-cream cone. If it seems to you that Ben & Jerry have a somewhat overly simplistic idea of politics, and an inflated idea of the importance of ice cream, well, you’re not alone – and you’re way late to the game.

Then again, it could be argued that Pecan Resist – “chocolate ice cream with white and dark fudge chunks, pecans, walnuts, and fudge-covered almonds (formerly known as New York Super Fudge Chunk in a previous incarnation)” – is a step further than Ben & Jerry have ever gone before. In their view, they are defending their progressive values against Donald Trump, and celebrating “the activists who are continuing to resist oppression, harmful environmental practices and injustice.”

To this end, in connection with the launch of Pecan Resist, they’ve donated $25,000 to four “progressive community groups”: Color Of Change (which tackles racism), Honor The Earth (environmentalism), Neta (which is “led by people of color along the Texas-Mexico border”), and, last but not least, the Women’s March.

Ben, Jerry, and (in hijab) Sarsour, celebrating the kickoff of the new flavor

Fine, you may say. Let them spend their profits as they wish. But the launch of Pecan Resist involved something more than just handing out cash to lefty groups. At an event held the day after the massacre of Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue, Ben & Jerry, who are themselves of Jewish background, held an event at which the most celebrated guest was Linda Sarsour, head of Women’s March.

We’ve written about Linda. Who hasn’t? She became famous on January 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration. She gave a fiery speech at that day’s Women’s March on Washington. She always wears hijab. She’s friends with Louis Farrakhan. She loves sharia. She’s the face of the radical Islamic Society of North America. She has said that Trump won the presidency “on the backs of Muslims.” She has routinely dismissed the impact of 9/11 and other jihadist acts on their victims and has just as routinely complained that Muslims are the victims of Islamophobia. She has demonized Brigitte Gabriel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali for daring to fret about the Islamic subjugation of women. And she has constantly made clear her contempt for Jews.

But none of this bothered Ben & Jerry. Confronted with her history, they’ve said they were cool with Sarsour. Okay, that’s their choice. But should we be cool with Ben and Jerry’s?

Posted on November 13, 2018November 2, 2018 by usefulstooges 0

Linda Sarsour, the Zelig of jihad

Linda Sarsour and friends (among them, notice actress Susan Sarandon)

Linda Sarsour’s social circle is a thing of wonder. This began to become common knowledge not long after she became a public figure on January 21, 2017 – the date of the Women’s March on Washington, of which she was a leading organizer and at which she was a prominent speaker. As we have discovered, Sarsour is chummy with Louis Farrakhan; she enjoys the support and admiration of socialists Bernie Sanders and Van Jones; and she turned out to be a good friend of Abdul El-Sayed, the Muslim who lost this summer’s Democratic primary for governor of Michigan.

But that was nothing. After the stunning news came, early in August, that a group of Muslims had been operating a camp in the New Mexico desert where they were teaching kids to become school shooters, it turned out that this compound had a Linda Sarsour connection. Specifically, three of the five people who were arrested at the place after a raid by authorities are the children of a Brooklyn imam named Siraj Wahhaj. Who is this imam? Well, for one thing, he was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. For another thing, he is an old pal of Linda Sarsour, who has mentioned him frequently with affection and gratitude.

In the case of Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, the son of the imam, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Like his pop, Sonny Boy would appear to be a past master in the fine art of killing innocents. That’s was he busy training those kids in New Mexico to do. The kids, by the way, were found starving and ragged in an underground trailer crammed with weapons and ammo. Also found there were the remains of a three-year-old boy who is believed to have been Wahhaj Junior’s son, whom he apparently abducted from the home of the child’s mother in Georgia.

As Leo Hohmann spelled out in an August 10 article, Siraj Wahhaj – the dad – has close ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Sarsour, as it happens, “has become the face of ISNA.” At an ISNA conference last year, reports Hohmann, “she praised Wahhaj Sr. as her ‘favorite person’ and called on U.S. Muslims to wage political jihad against the Trump administration.” And we quote:

And to my favorite person in this room, that’s mutual, is Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who has been a mentor, motivator, and encourager of mine. Someone who has taught me to speak truth to power, and not worry about the consequences. Someone who has taught me that we are on this earth to please Allah and only Allah, and that we are not here to please any man or woman on this earth. So I am grateful to you Imam Siraj, and you might think this is weird, but every once in a while, when I get into that deep dark place, Imam Siraj comes and talks to me. And he helps me to emerge out of those places, so I’m grateful to you Imam Siraj, and may Allah bless you and protect you for a long time for our community, because we need you now more than ever.

Wouldn’t you think that the mainstream media, which have been so eager during the last year and a half to promote Sarsour, this self-identified “feminist” in a hijab, would consider her ties to the Taos County jihad camp big news? No, of course you wouldn’t, unless you were an incredible naif. In fact, as expected, the media have all but buried this story. Along with it, they’ve buried the fact that, as Hohmann records, “Wahhaj Sr. was an honored guest at the Clinton State Department and the Obama White House,” that he “was the first Muslim to lead prayer at the U.S. House of Representatives in 1991,” and that he has proclaimed that it is the duty of Muslims “to replace the U.S. Constitution with the Quran.” (He’s also “called for death to all homosexuals and lesbians,” but that’s hardly surprising from such a devout Muslim.)

Once again, then, Linda Sarsour has dodged scandal. She remains a darling of the American left and of the American media. One wonders what it will take to change that. Maybe if she takes off the hijab?

Posted on September 4, 2018September 19, 2018 by usefulstooges 1

What creep isn’t pals with Linda Sarsour?

We first wrote about Linda Sarsour on April 13 of last year. A few weeks earlier, on the day after President Trump’s inauguration, the Women’s March on Washington had turned Linda Sarsour, one of the event’s organizers and lead speakers, into a household name. She was the one in hijab, the one who began her speech with the words “as-salāmu ʿalaykum,” the one who told the crowd that she was “unapologetically Muslim-American,” and the one who vowed: “I will respect the presidency, but I will not respect this President of the United States of America.” Why? Because Trump had “won the election on the backs of Muslims,” a group that had been “suffering in silence for the past fifteen years.”

Women’s March on Washington, January 21, 2017

And what had happened fifteen years earlier? 9/11. “For her,” we noted, “the history of the last fifteen years has been a history not of one barbaric mass murder after another performed in the name of Islam, but of a silent epidemic of cruel, soul-crushing Islamophobia.”

Sarsour, of course, presented herself as a feminist. Soon, however, it emerged that she was a zealous supporter of sharia law. She was also fiercely hostile to women, such as Brigitte Gabriel and the former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are critical of the unequal and often brutal treatment of women under sharia. Unable to answer their charges, Sarsour attacked them personally, tweeting that they were “asking 4 an a$$ whippin’” and that “they don’t deserve to be women.”

Reprehensible. Nonetheless, Sarsour enjoys the support of Bernie Sanders, Keith Ellison, Van Jones, Amnesty International, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and a number of other left-wing individuals and institutions. When we caught up with her in November, Time and Glamour had joined the list. We also discovered that in addition to playing a role in the decision of Brandeis University to decide against giving an honorary degree to Hirsi Ali, Sarsour had also influenced New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision to stop monitoring mosques – a move that made it possible for at least one jihadist, Saypullo Saipov, to take eight lives.

Yet her star continues to climb. Earlier this summer it was reported that Abdul El-Sayed, one of the Democratic candidates for governor of Michigan (he lost the August 7 primary, thank goodness), is close to Sarsour. This didn’t come as a huge surprise. El-Sayed, a Muslim, received the endorsements of two prominent self-identified socialists, Senator Sanders and media darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Still, as former prosecutor Ari Lieberman wrote, El-Sayed’s “association with Sarsour should raise alarm bells.”

For one thing, there’s her enthusiasm for sharia law. For another, she’s “an anti-Semite to her core and is on record making a number of disparaging comments about the ‘Jewish media,’ Zionism and Israel.” Then there’s her “support for Assata Shakur, a murderer who killed a New Jersey state trooper in a 1973 shootout.” (When CNN’s Jake Tapper, a card-carrying liberal, questioned her defense of Shakur, Sarsour “bizarrely accused Tapper of being a member of the ‘alt-right.’”) And let’s not forget “her unabashed support for the unrepentant Judeophobe, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.” Once upon a time Farrakhan was the third rail of American politics; no more, apparently.

“Aspiring Democratic politicians like El-Sayed,” lamented Lieberman, “no longer shy away from toxic bigots like Sarsour. Sadly, they embrace them.” No sooner had El-Sayed lost the primary, however, than another connection to Sarsour made the news. We’ll get to that next time.

Posted on August 30, 2018August 20, 2018 by usefulstooges 2

Trayon White: A disgrace even by the usual Democratic city government standards

Is he dumber than he is anti-Semitic, or more anti-Semitic than he is dumb? Your call.

First, on March 16 of this year, Trayon White, a member of the city council in Washington, D.C., posted a Facebook video of a snowfall along with a comment of his own suggesting that “the Rothschilds” are “controlling the climate to create natural disasters that they can pay for to own the cities, man.” It soon emerged that this was not the first time he had expressed the opinion that Jews run the weather.

Baron David René de Rothschild, current French chairman of N. M. Rothschild & Sons

International outrage led him to issue an apology. No sooner had the leaders of Jewish organizations accepted the apology and claimed to regard it as sincere did the City Council release video of a February 27 breakfast event at which White had accused the Rothschilds of controlling the federal government and World Bank. White apologized for this, too, writing that “Somehow, I read and misconstrued both the Rockefeller and Rothchild [sic] theories. At that breakfast, I indeed misspoke, was really misinformed on the issue and ran with false information. I think I heard other similar information before about the theory around the World Bank and put it all together.” Makes sense to us! No, seriously, let bygones be bygones. No reason to deprive the people of Washington of such a stellar intellect simply because he got a little confused.

White, by the way, is a protégé of late Washington mayor Marion Barry, most famous for having been convicted of smoking crack. White is also a former member of the U.S. capital’s Board of Education, which to anyone familiar with public education in D.C. will not be all that surprising. He’s also donated money to Louis Farrakhan’s rabidly Jew-hating Nation of Islam.

Anyway, after his Rothschild remarks, White, as an act of “conciliation” with the Jewish community – i.e., a PR move – agreed to take a 90-minute guided tour of the Holocaust Museum. Great idea, right? Nope.

As the Daily Mail reported, when he saw a 1937 picture of “a woman surrounded by Nazi soldiers with a sign hanging from her neck that read: ‘I am a German girl and allowed myself to be defiled by a Jew,’ White asked, ‘Are they protecting her?’” The tour guide explained that they were not: they were marching her down the street to shame her. “Marching through,” replied White, “is protecting.” The guide, with what reads like a patience that passeth all understanding, said, “I think they’re humiliating her.”

And then, 90 minutes apparently being too much of a test of his attention span, he left the tour before it was over. He claimed to have a meeting to get to, but was later “seen walking around aimlessly outside of the museum.” Meanwhile one of his aides, who had decided to stick with the tour to the end, replied to a mini-lesson about the Warsaw ghetto by asking if it was like “a gated community.”

If there was anything more reprehensible than White’s unashamed display of bigotry and ignorance, it was the readiness of some members of the Washington, D.C., Jewish community to stand by him. In the Forward, Rafael Shimunov, an official of the Working Families Party, co-founder of ResistHere, and veteran of a long list of left-wing activist groups, argued that “many in the DC community and the Jewish community need to examine how easily they found themselves mocking a black man who has devoted his life to the public service of America’s most vulnerable.” Nice try, but no dice. It is preposterous that a fool and knave like White can hold high elective office in Washington, D.C. The best thing he can do to serve“ America’s most vulnerable” is to quit his job and work for the election of somebody with a minimally acceptable I.Q., education, level of intellectual curiosity, and moral compass.

Posted on June 12, 2018June 12, 2018 by usefulstooges 0

Louis Farrakhan: The music man

As we noted last week, Louis Farrakhan, the longtime head of the Nation of Islam and one of the most notorious white-haters and anti-Semites in America during the last few decades, began his career as a calypso musician. He quit music on orders from Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammed, but decades later he returned to it, reportedly after being encouraged to do so by yet another one of his high-placed and apparently shame-free friends – Sylvia Olden Lee, a vocal coach who was the first African-American employee of the Metropolitan Opera and who performed at the White House for the first inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Farrakan gave the first performance in his newly resumed career as part of a three-day Winston-Salem, North Carolina, event devoted to black musicians and classical music. It was reviewed in the New York Times on April 9, 1993, by Bernard Holland, who wrote:

He plays the violin.

Can Louis Farrakhan play the violin? God bless us, he can. He makes a lot of mistakes, not surprising for a man who had virtually abandoned the instrument for 40 years and has only owned one since 1974. Yet Mr. Farrakhan’s sound is that of the authentic player. It is wide, deep and full of the energy that makes the violin gleam. His thrusting sense of phrase has musical power to it….

“God bless us”? Holy cow.

That was only the beginning. In February 2002, in Cerritos, California, Farrakhan gave a violin recital entitled “A Night of Beethoven.” The years went by. Every now and then, when he wasn’t busy delivering venomous sermons or hanging out with the likes of Barack Obama and Keith Ellison, Farrakhan would return to the musical stage, apparently to the great enjoyment of many, who either shared his vile views or who were somehow willing to overlook them.

Now his career as a performing artist has reached a new chapter. On March 15, both Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward reported that he’d just dropped a new seven-CD set. Artists like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Barbra Streisand have had big hits with albums of duets on which they perform with other big-name stars. Farrakhan’s new release, Let’s Change the World, follows the same formula. Among the entertainers who appear with him on the set, which sells for $260 and “features 45 songs in a variety of genres, including classical, gospel, jazz, folk, opera, rap, reggae and calypso,” are Stevie Wonder, Snoop Dogg, Chaka Khan, Rick Ross, Damian Marley, Stephanie Mills, and Common. Snoop Dogg, as it happens, is not only a musical collaborator of Farrakhan’s but a sometime member of the Nation of Islam, which he joined in 2009.

Well, as they say, music is the universal language. It transcends place and time and culture. And, sometimes, simple moral decency.

Posted on April 17, 2018March 28, 2018 by usefulstooges 0

Farrakhan: the left’s favorite anti-Semite?

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came.

On Tuesday we saw that Louis Farrakhan, the longtime head of the Nation of Islam, has, over the course of his career, has been a consistent hater of Jews and whites, an admirer of Hitler, and a friend of such admirable types as Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Farrakhan was chummy with somebody else too – Barack Obama. In 1995, Obama, along with Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, and others, helped Farrakhan organize the so-called “Million Man March.”

The two men were all smiles in a snapshot that was taken at a 2005 meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus, but that was kept out of the public eye until this year. (Upon finally releasing the picture, the photographer, Askia Muhammad, who at the time had been working for the Nation of Islam, explained that he had held it back for all these years because he realized that it could have seriously damaged Obama’s political career.)

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Farrakhan hailed Obama as “a herald of the messiah.” According to Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam donated money to Obama’s 1996 campaign for the Illinois Senate; a former Farrakhan aid later said that during Obama’s time in the state legislature, the two men were in frequent and direct touch.

Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the first Muslim member of the U.S. House of Representatives, is a former Nation of Islam member (he once wrote under the Nation of Islam name “Keith X Ellison”) who has repeatedly defended Farrakhan’s anti-semitic and anti-white rhetoric.

Tamara Mallory with Farrakhan, aka “The Greatest of All Time”

Cut to February 2018. Tamika Mallory, an organizer of the Women’s March, was spotted at a Farrakhan speech in which he spoke of “Satanic Jews,” said that “when you want something in this world, the Jew holds the door,” declared that “the powerful Jews are my enemy” and predicted that “white folks are going down.” He even “gave Mallory a personal shoutout,” according to the ADL. The event drew attention to Mallory’s longtime support for Farrakhan. (She once posted on Instagram a picture of herself with him, captioned “GOAT” – short for Greatest of All Time.) Under pressure to disavow Farrakhan, she refused, tweeting: “I won’t go back, I won’t redraw the lines of division. I want a new way.”

As it happens, Mallory’s fellow Women’s March leaders, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour, also have ties to Farrakhan–and also refuse to cut him loose. In an official Women’s March statement, they said that they had chosen to remain silent about Farrakhan because they had been discussing the matter with “queer, trans, Jewish and Black” activists and were seeking to “break the cycles that pit our communities against each other.” When a black minister defended Farrakhan on Twitter, Sarsour wrote to him: “you are too blessed to be stressed. You are a man walking the path towards justice & standing up for the most marginalized. Stay strong and stay focused.”

You stay focused, too. Back on Tuesday with a few last words on Farrakhan.

Posted on April 12, 2018April 15, 2018 by usefulstooges 0

Useful Stooges