William Ayres office door...
PURELY SPECULATIVE:
Barack Obama's Close Encounter with the Weather Underground
Barack Obama in New York ca. 1981 or '82.
We Need a Mau Mau in Mississippi
On December 20, 1964 at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, Malcolm X declared, “Oginga Odinga [the Vice President of recently-liberated Kenya] is not passive. He’s not meek. He’s not humble. He’s not nonviolent. But he’s free.”
This fact was part of a larger object lesson that Malcolm X had for Black Americans:
‘...Jomo Kenyatta, Oginga Odinga, and the Mau Mau will go down as the greatest African patriots and freedom fighters that that continent ever knew, and they will be given credit for bringing about the independence of many of the existing independent states on that continent right now. There was a time when their image was negative, but today they’re looked upon with respect and their chief is the president and their next chief is the vice president.
‘I have to take time to mention that because, in my opinion, not only in Mississippi and Alabama, but right here in New York City, you and I can best learn how to get real freedom by studying how Kenyatta brought it to his people in Kenya, and how Odinga helped him, and the excellent job that was done by the Mau Mau freedom fighters. In fact, that’s what we need in Mississippi. In Mississippi we need a Mau Mau. In Alabama we need a Mau Mau. In Georgia we need a Mau Mau. Right here in Harlem, in New York City, we need a Mau Mau.
‘I say it with no anger; I say it with very careful forethought...’
http://georgehartley.blogspot.com/2009/01/we-need-mau-mau-in-mississippi-malcolm.html
William Ayres office door...
PURELY SPECULATIVE:
Barack Obama's Close Encounter with the Weather Underground
Barack Obama in New York ca. 1981 or '82.
"America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem," Malcolm X wrote in 1964 during his pilgrimage to Mecca. Though Malcolm's anti-white rhetoric was moderated after his conversion from the Nation of Islam (NOI) to orthodox Sunni Islam, his disdain for the West, rooted in extremist black nationalism, remained integral to his Muslim identity.
Malcolm's words now appear on countless Islamist websites dedicated to finding black, English-speaking converts. The assumption that all African-American Muslims broke their ties with the anti-Western, anti-white, and anti-Semitic worldview of the NOI is a naive one.
Warith Deen Mohammed was born Wallace D. Muhammad. He was the seventh child of Elijah and Clara Muhammad.
Though Warith Deen Muhammed, who led the majority of the members of the NOI to Sunni Islam in the mid-1970s, was more interested in alleviating domestic problems like crime and poverty than in creating an Islamic political movement, many of his followers were loath to abandon their radical ideology.
Islamists have harnessed these radicals' anti-Western black nationalism for their own purpose: establishing an indigenous Islamist movement in the United States that can advocate their political agenda in the foreign and domestic policy spheres. The Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA) and the As-Sabiqun movement are proof that their efforts have not been in vain.
Born as Jeffrey Kearse, Imam Siraj Wahhaj was raised as a Baptist in New York City.
* Advisory board member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations
* Named as a possible co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
* Advocates the replacement of the U.S. government with an Islamic Caliphate
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Imam Siraj Wahhaj, the founder of the primarily African-American MANA, is a product of the volatile intersection of black nationalism and politicized Islam. A former member of the NOI, Wahhaj often has been portrayed as a "moderate" by the mainstream media. However, his words speak for themselves: "In time, this so-called democracy will crumble, and there will be nothing, and the only thing that will remain will be Islam," Wahhaj has predicted.
Born in Arkansas as Clarence Reams, Imam Abdul Alim Musa was raised in Oakland, California during the 1960s, when he embraced the ideology of the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam....Musa at that time became a "leading cocaine-exporter in Colombia" and he met exiled Black Panther leaders such as Eldridge Cleaver and Pete O'Neal in Algeria. Discover the Networks
Imam Abdul Alim Musa of the As-Sabiqun movement is even more overt about his Islamist worldview. As-Sabiqun, founded in the early 1990s, advocates the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in place of America's democratic system. Though officially a Sunni Muslim, Musa's views echo those of the NOI.
"Who ran the slave trade?" Musa asks rhetorically. "You'll study and you will find out: the Jews." His words suggest the influence of the NOI's The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which first outlined this conspiratorial distortion of history.
Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin was born Hubert Gerold Brown in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1943. Popularly known as H. Rap Brown, in May 1967 he succeeded Stokely Carmichael as the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
* Sixties radical, led “black power” movement
* Former Executive Board President of the American Muslim Council
* Currently serving a life sentence for killing a police officer in 2000
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Another prominent leader of the African-American Islamist movement is Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, the former H. Rap Brown, who is now incarcerated for murder. Like his colleagues, Imam al-Amin has only disdain for his country of origin, saying, "[The main essence of the U.S. Constitution] is diametrically opposed to what Allah has commanded." At al-Amin's mosque in Atlanta, attendees sported combat uniforms and long robes, reflecting the influence of both Black Panther-style nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism.
African-American Professor Robert F. Reid-Pharr, in his article "Speaking through Anti-Semitism: The Nation of Islam and the Poetics of Black (Counter) Modernity," ascribes the susceptibility of African-American Muslims to anti-Western and anti-Semitic rhetoric to their rejection of modernity and capitalism. According to Reid-Pharr, many African-Americans view Western modernity as flawed from its inception because it was built on the foundation of slavery.
This distrust for the modern world is evident in the words of Malcolm X, who said, "Show me a capitalist and I'll show you a bloodsucker." Many African-American Muslims have therefore embraced the Islamist agenda as a means to overcome inequalities they see as inherent to the modern Western system.
The irony of this situation is that the argument that politicized Islam inherently improves the position of racial minorities is entirely untenable from both a historical and a modern perspective. Though many Islamist websites make claims like "only ... through Islam has this idea [‘of racial equality and of human brotherhood'] ever been realized in action," reality tells a different story.
According to historian Bernard Lewis in his book Race and Slavery in the Middle East, slavery was an established practice in the lands of Islam from the time of Muhammad. The Islamic states later hosted an extensive slave trade network that rivaled that of the Europeans. A look at the modern world is even more telling: in the Arab Islamic states of Mauritania and Sudan, black slavery is still so pervasive that the word "black" in the local Arabic dialect has become synonymous with "slave."
Mainstream Muslims have begun to realize that Islam is not a cure-all for society's racial ills. They have subsequently started to address the prejudice of immigrant Muslim groups against African-Americans. For instance, Altaf Husain, a former president of the Muslim Students Association, said at a 2007 MANA conference, "It is a shame that in the 21st century, the problem in the Muslim-American community is the color line."
However, fringe elements of the African-American Muslim community still identify with Islamist causes, because, from their myopic perspective, it is more important to impose the hijab or combat the "Zionist media" than to address issues like prejudice, drug abuse, or crime. This distorted set of priorities provides a catalyst for African-American Islamists' disregard for U.S. laws, expressed in numerous violent crimes and terrorist plots. These plots include those most recently against a U.S. military recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas, a Jewish community center in Riverdale, New York, and Jewish and U.S. government targets in Los Angeles.
Iman Warith Deen Umar
* Muslim cleric
* Former Islamic chaplain of New York's prison system
* In 1971 was a member of the Harlem Five, and was tried on conspiracy-to-murder charges
"Even Muslims who say they are against terrorism secretly admire and applaud [the 9/11 hijackers]. . . . This is the sort of teaching they don't want in prison. But this is what I'm doing."
Warith Deen Umar is a Muslim cleric who, prior to his retirement in 2000, spent some twenty years helping to run New York's growing Islamic prison program...He continues to visit New York state prisons as a volunteer chaplain.He believes that the 9/11 hijackers should be honored as martyrs... Discover the Networks
Today, many African-American prisoners are turning to radical Islam. The government has neglected its oversight responsibilities, allowing men like Imam Warith Deen Umar to become influential Islamic chaplains in the prison system. Umar has noted the utility of prisons for terrorist recruitment and made such reassuring statements as, "Even Muslims who say they are against terrorism secretly admire and applaud [the 9/11 hijackers]."
Under the supervision of men like Umar, Saudi-funded programs have introduced the most intolerant Salafi and Wahhabi interpretations of Islam to convicts. These interpretations, claiming that an Islamic caliphate will alleviate racism and societal strife, support the radical doctrines of imams like Wahhaj and Musa over the moderate positions of W.D. Mohammed.
Since abandoning the NOI and turning to orthodox Sunni Islam, most African-American Muslims have mitigated their anti-Western and anti-Semitic ideology. However, the danger of Islamists who seek to take advantage of black nationalism's legacy of intolerance remains. It is therefore imperative to marginalize fringe Islamist elements of the African-American Muslim community and empower those who seek personal fulfillment, not political dominance, in their Islamic faith.
Brendan Goldman is a senior at New York University, majoring in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, and an intern at the Middle East Forum. Research for the article was conducted under the auspices of Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.