APARTHEID ALLIANCE
Black separatists in the Nation of Islam are working with white racists,
reveals Robert Singh FOUR YEARS ago in Chicago Louis 1- ar- rakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, was concluding one of his lengthy sermons. Parrakhan, I love you!' cried a black woman in the audience. 'I love you, too,' came the reply, 'but remember: disorgan- ised love is not as effective as organised hate.'
Echoes of Farrakhan's advice reverber- ated recently with the NOI's disruption of the Stephen Lawrence murder inquiry. With shrewd timing, Jack Straw subse- quently renewed the 12-year ban on Far- rakhan entering Britain. The BBC then aired a promotional video for the NOI masquerading as an Everyman documen- tary. The NOI's traditional American approach — stoke controversy to secure maximum publicity at minimum cost has been successfully imported to the UK.
But, amidst the ensuing feeding frenzy in the press, one feature has escaped com- ment: the common vision of Britain's ideal racial future that these black militants shared with the five white youths at the Lawrence inquiry.
Peer behind the NOI's unsmiling faces, sharp suits and bow ties and one finds black nationalism obscuring some pro- foundly conservative beliefs. Adamantly pro-God, nation and the nuclear family, the NOI is also anti-abortion, adultery, gays and drugs. Law and order? Far- rakhan's model is Saudi Arabia. Eco- nomics? The Nation preaches black private enterprise and demands an end to all government benefits to blacks. Rela- tions between the sexes? On joining the NOI, according to one former member, women receive instruction in seven 'basic' units: cooking, sewing, raising children, taking care of the husband, care of the home, and proper behaviour inside and outside the home.
In America, some Republican politi- cians, such as Jack Kemp, offer two cheers for Farrakhan's group. The NOI's congeni- tal conservatism and philanthropic good deeds (intervening with black gangs, opposing drugs) outweigh the Jew-baiting, anti-whitey diatribes, anti-black conspiracy theories and links with anti-American despots like Saddam. A full conservative embrace is precluded, nonetheless, by Far- rakhan's exotic CV: visiting Tehran to wel- come America's destruction by Islam as a `privilege'; describing Hitler as a 'wickedly great man', Judaism as a 'dirty' religion and Jews as 'the synagogue of Satan'; and accepting the 1996 Gaddafi International Human Rights Award. But the NOI's com- bination of anti-Semitism, antipathy to government and wholesale rejection of racial integration has assisted the sealing of another, less auspicious alliance: a Faustian pact between the NOI and white supremacists on both sides of the Atlantic.
In America, this dangerous liaison has a long lineage. In the early 1960s, the NOI secretly negotiated with the Ku-Klux Klan and the American Nazi party to divide a portion of Georgia or South Carolina for a separate black state to be placed under NOI control. George Rockwell, leader of the American Nazis, won applause at the Nation's annual convention in 1962 when he described its prophet and then leader, Eli- jah Muhammad, as 'the Adolf Hitler of the black man'. Tom Metzger, who left the John Birch Society because it was too soft on Jews, joined the KKK, founded the White Aryan Resistance, and donated $100 to the cause at a 1985 NOI rally in Los Angeles. Metzger subsequently claimed to have had meetings with Farrakhan to discuss their common plans for America's division into mono-ethnic enclaves. Less well known is the British National Front's role in convinc- ing white American fascists and neo-Nazis to hold their supremacist noses and embrace the NM.
The NF discovered Farrakhan in 1984, when it supported Jesse Jackson's campaign for the US presidency (on the grounds that it would antagonise Jews and hasten a race war). Subsequently, the NF supported Far- rakhan's call for racial separatism and his opposition to interracial marriage, urging `practical co-operation' by British fascists with the group. A senior NF official visited the group's Washington DC mosque in May 1988. In Britain, NF publications praised the NOI and the NF candidate Patrick Harring- ton campaigned (unsuccessfully) in local elections in Vauxhall in June 1989 with black separatist assistance. Although he has consistently denied any direct personal con- tact with far-right whites, Farrakhan has conceded a mutual understanding: 'I have got respect for any white man who wants to keep his race white, 'cause I certainly wanna keep mine black.'
For both sides in the racist rapproche- ment, co-operation is just a temporary expedient. The NOI's bizarre theology a melange of unorthodox Islam, Christiani- ty and numerology — provides the key. Blacks must awaken and leave Babylon prior to Armageddon when God will wreak divine retribution on whites for the evils they have visited upon blacks. Forget- ting the temporary compact, white supremacists are, with the rest of their ignoble race, ultimately doomed.
This unholy alliance, conjoined to the eclectic theology and the penguin suits, makes it tempting to satirise the NOI (its British figurehead, Wayne X, might have been invented by Harry Enfield). Far- rakhan, meanwhile, is a man who touts himself as the saviour of humanity, has visions of travel in spaceships and once held that Ronald Wilson Reagan was the devil incarnate because the numbers in his name added up to 666. The NOI leader began his career as a night-club singer, recording a calypso tribute to America's first sex-change operation.
But complacency and derision are mis- placed. The movement is hardly a benign force. The NOI's numbers may be small in the United States and Great Britain, but Farrakhan's group thrives on its status as black martyrs. The NOI rejects proactive black vigilantism. But its lurid rhetoric legitimises the malice and hatred from which acts of violence flow. Farrakhan now concedes that he `contributed to the atmo- sphere' of violence that prompted Mal- colm X's assassination in February 1965 (he'd written three months previously that Malcolm was a `dog' who was `worthy of death'). And it seems more than a coinci- dence that the increased incidence of recorded attacks on Jewish students on US college campuses over the 1990s coincided with NOI ministers becoming fashionable speakers at black college fraternities.
Most black Britons are unlikely to accept the blandishments of a quasi-fascist, sectarian Islamic group that has connived with white supremacists and lauds self-suf- ficiency, but depends on government subsi- dies and loans from foreign despots. Perhaps the only positive consequence of the confrontation at the Lawrence inquiry was that the twin faces of bigotry across the racial divide were graphically revealed.
The author is lecturer in politics at the Uni- versity of Edinburgh and author of The Far- rakhan Phenomenon: Race, Reaction, and the Paranoid Style in American Politics (Georgetown University Press, 1997).
Previous page
