I don’t like the “Farrakhan litmus test” any more than The Root’s Marjorie Valbrun does, but Tim Russert had a valid reason for pressing Obama on the issue last night. And Obama’s answers ought to put the matter to rest. There are no grounds to doubt him on the issue of antisemitism. (Funny that Obama’s on the hot seat for bigotry, considering what’s being hurled at him by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Bill Cunningham.)
Opposition to Farrakhan is almost always presented as a Jewish issue, which is unfortunate. Farrakhan’s Jew-baiting is clear enough, but few talk about his long record of support for the brutalization of black Africans, at the hands of deplorable regimes like Abacha’s Nigeria and Bashir’s Sudan. Farrakhan is not just a bigot, but also a totalitarian.
The Nation of Islam, moreover, is a cult founded on sham theology and pseudoscience, as discussed in this recent New York magazine profile of former true believer Khalil Islam.
Ingeniously, through such initiatives as the Million Man March, Farrakhan has managed, despite his abysmal record on global justice for dark-skinned people, to position himself as a positive figure in the minds of many African-Americans. As Valbrun puts it, “Maybe black people have a hard time denouncing — at the command of whites — other black people, especially those who despite their worst characteristics, have also done some good for the larger black community.” That’s understandable, until you expand “the larger black community” to include, for instance, the Ogoni of Nigeria or the southern Sudanese.
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