41845358-Antisemitism

ANTISEMITIC MYTHS BLACKWASHED
227
anti-Semitism and black racism that continued to shroud Farrakhan and his
organization in a negative veil of the vilest bigotry were essentially secondary
to the formulation of a common national black American political agenda.” 11
Another indication that Farrakhan was gaining legitimacy as a national
black leader was the entente he forged with Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s
widow. What prompted Shabazz, who had earlier incriminated Farrakhan in
her husband’s assassination and had never forgiven him for it, to consummate
an accommodation with the Nation of Islam leader was the arrest in early
1995 of her daughter, Qubillah Shabazz, for conspiring to assassinate Farrakhan
in an act of revenge. Apparently a deal was struck, for the charges
against Qubillah were dropped. And most important for Farrakhan’s agenda
was the healing of the rift that had divided blacks after the assassination of the
immensely popular Malcolm. The opposition to Farrakhan on this issue had
been effectively neutralized.
The extraordinary success of the Million Man March on October 16,
1995, which Farrakhan initiated and organized, confirmed his place in the
ranks of black political leadership. Some 400,000 black men—some estimates
are significantly higher—converged on the nation’s capital at Farrakhan’s request—more
than twice the number that attended Martin Luther King’s historic
march in 1963. Joining them were numerous African American
dignitaries, including Jesse Jackson, several congressmen, academics, and Rosa
Parks, an icon in the civil rights struggle. Many of the participants, particularly
the noteworthies, claimed that it was solidarity with fellow blacks and a hope
of black spiritual renewal, and not Farrakhan the man or his antiwhite and antisemitic
message, that brought them to Washington. The demonstration, for
which Farrakhan delivered the keynote address, was a spectacular indication
that he was a prominent African American leader.
In 1996, several months after the triumph of the Million Man March, Farrakhan
embarked on a World Friendship Tour of Africa and the Middle East
that included visits with the notorious dictators of Libya, Nigeria, and the
Sudan, and fundamentalist clerics in Iran. Farrakhan’s support of these regimes
has somewhat sullied his reputation among politically aware African Americans.
He has accepted millions of dollars from the Libyan dictator Muammar
Gadhafi and praised both the clerical rulers of Iran for their attacks on the
“Great Satan,” as they refer to the United States, and the fundamentalist Islamic
leadership of Sudan, whose human rights violations include tolerating the
persecution and enslavement of tens of thousands of black African Christians
and animists. Indeed, Farrakhan has refused to speak out against slavery in the
Sudan despite mounting and irrefutable evidence. Similarly, in his concern for