“Like many Arab Americans, Rezko had close ties to the Nation of Islam, which sympathized with the Palestinian and Arab causes. He became close to the inspiring icons like Muhammad Ali and even young Obama, a little-known state legislator who later rose to stardom.”
Rezko is representative of a recent trend in Chicago politics: the rise of Arab wheeler-dealers as corruption catalysts.
The elites of the African-American and Arab communities may tend to agree on foreign policy. But down on the street, relations are hostile. The Arab immigrants, who are best known in Chicago as middle-man merchants operating liquor stores and the like in the ghetto, much like the Koreans in South Central Los Angeles at the time of the 1992 riots, are too hated by black voters to win political power for themselves through the ballot box. Hence their leaders tend to play shadowy roles in Chicago politics.
Rezko kept a sharp eye out for upcoming black political talent who could provide a politically correct front for him. Rezmar offered Obama a job in 1990. He didn’t take it, but that was the beginning of a long and mutually beneficial friendship between Rezko and the man who is now the Democratic Presidential nominee. Rezko paid for 15 percent of Obama’s first campaign, and Obama looked out in the state senate for Rezko’s interests in low-income housing and in packing the state’s hospital construction board.
Contract set-asides for minorities provide a lucrative opening for crooks like Rezko. The demand for “diversity” provides an excuse for a thumb on the scales, a justification for diverting the contract from the lowest bidder to a political ally who employs a minority frontman. Most of America’s pundit class hasn’t figured this out yet, but Rezko grasped how “diversity” works soon after getting off the plane. (Indeed, multicultural America is becoming ever more like the Ottoman Empire, giving an advantage to immigrants from old Ottoman mercantile minorities.)
Chicago explained: “Rezko ran Jabir Muhammad’s firm, Crucial Concessions. Under Mayor Washington [remember that fundraiser?], Crucial won the concessions to sell food at city beaches.”
Now I know why Chicago beach concession food in the 1980s was so untasty. The municipal hot dog stands were managed by the Nation of Islam and Tony Rezko!
Muhammad and Rezko worked the same minority set-aside scam with several high-grossing Panda Expresses at O’Hare airport. The Chicago Sun-Times reported on March 17, 2005:
“Two restaurants at O’Hare Airport have been allowed to rake in millions of dollars, even though the Daley administration learned back in 2002 that the company running them was probably a phony minority “front” for Panda Express and Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a top fund-raiser for Gov. Blagojevich. Crucial Inc. won the O’Hare concessions in part because it was certified as a minority-owned business. Its largest shareholder was listed as Jabir Herbert Muhammad, son of the late Nation of Islam founder, Elijah Muhammad. … The [Chicago minority contractor] program has been tarred by a relentless string of scandals…”[City ignored possible O’Hare ‘front’ for years, By Chris Fusco, Fran Spielman And Michael Sneed]
Jabir and Tony also got a $10 million affirmative action contract from SBC, the giant phone company whose president was William Daley, Mayor Richie Daley’s brother, to run the payphones at the Cook County jail. Their designated owner-operator was a twofer under the quota of 35 percent of contracts reserved for minority and women-owned businesses: a black woman named Deloris Wade, although she happened to be dead.
Building on these black Chicago roots, Rezko eventually became the statewide power behind the throne when the Democrats swept to victory in the 2002 elections. Chicago Magazine reported:
“Rezko became a virtual one-man headhunting firm for staffing the Blagojevich administration, sending along recommended candidates, many of whom ended up getting appointments. … (The U.S. attorney here has charged that Rezko schemed to pack the government with his cronies so that they could peddle their influence.)”
Diversity sensitivity also provides a convenient justification for corruption:
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080901_chicago.htm
MORE at posts:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2268284/posts?page=1
Meet America’s first Muslim: It’s a real scream
canadafreepress ^ | June 8, 2009 | Paul Williams
Posted on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 4:51:43 PM by givemELL
Timothy Drew is not a subject of black history month. He has not been the subject of a PBS documentary nor a critical biography. Most history professors, even at prestigious black universities, know little about him. But few African American leaders have cast a larger shadow. Without Drew, there would be no black leaders such as Elijah Mohammed, Malcolm X, Mukasa Dada, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, or Louis Farrakhan; no organizations such as the Black Power Movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Death Angels, or the New Black Panthers; no rap and hip-hop artists such as Public Enemy, Ice Cube, KRS-One, X-Clan, or Lauryn Hill; and no Barack Hussein Obama.
By 1913, Timothy Drew, now known as Noble Drew Ali, managed to convince hundreds of Newark Negroes that they were not the descendants of African slaves, but the sons and daughters of Berber Moors, the very Moors who had introduced slavery to the Ivory Coast. In 1913, he opened what is reportedly the first mosque in America - - the Holy Moabite Temple of the Science of the World, also known as the Canaanite Temple. “The Moors were living up and down the Mississippi River before the European man came to them,‚” Drew told his flock. “The bananas were large and the grapes were four-in-hand. It took two men with hand sticks to carry a bunch of grapes.‚”1
No one within the Moorish Science Movement came to realize that the