An Exhortation to Self-Preservation Minister Farrakhan’s courageous Miami message frightens naysayers By Demetric Muhammad, NOI Research Group The Final Call Newspaper has done a magnificent job in covering the epic and historic national tour of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan as he crisscrosses the country preparing the Black community for the 20th Anniversary of the Million Man March. This 20th anniversary theme is “Justice or Else.” The Final Call has been an indispensable source for accurate coverage of the Minister’s tour. Their work documents his victories over the propagandists who work to distort his message and keep the masses of the public from hearing the Minister’s analysis and God-given guidance. The Final Call along with Minister Farrakhan’s Twitter Army gives us visibility into how profoundly the Minister is impacting the masses. The John and Jane Q. Public of the Black community have taken to social media to express their approval of the Minister’s message. In fact the popularity of Minister Farrakhan in social media offsets the mainstream media’s policy of refusing to cover the Minister. This has been their strategy regarding the Minister ever since the overwhelming success of the original Million Man March in 1995. It was there that the media giants learned that even though they hated Minister Farrakhan, Black people loved him. They learned that to vilify Minister Farrakhan was to greater magnetize him among his own people. They concluded that both positive and negative coverage of the Minister only served to help his cause. They concluded to adopt a new policy which is to act as if Minister Farrakhan doesn’t exist at all. Their’s is an attempt to essentially bury the Minister while he is still alive. And this has indeed caused various persons who were used to following the Minister’s work in the media to wonder if he is still alive. Unfortunately for those whose desire it is to keep the Black community oppressed, deceived and corrupted, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan is alive, strong and bolder than ever in his speaking truth to power. I am writing this piece to address what I have witnessed in social media and the blogosphere concerning the Minister’s recent message in the city of Miami Florida. There the Minister in his own powerful and inimitable way, drew from critical passages of scripture to minister and really offer pastoral care to the Black community during our time of suffering. As a Minister, one must be skilled in accessing the relevant contents of the sacred books of God and religion for the purpose of healing the mental, spiritual, emotional and behavioral conditions of their congregations. It is a skill that often makes the work of the minister or pastor similar to that of a physician or pharmacist. 1 | An Exhortation to Self-Preservation
We study the word of God as it is found in the Bible and the Holy Qur’an. We study the condition of the people. And we pray and ask God for guidance in the applying of His word in an effective and meaningful way in the lives those we are called to serve. And often times we are amazed and surprised at how He guides us. Many times He leads us to lift passages of scripture that are not popular. Yet as the Bible says in 1Timothy 3:16-17: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” And whereas professional ministers and pastors excel at this function of their calling, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has mastered this skill and ability. At issue are the words spoken by the Minister in the passion of his message in Miami wherein he stated: “Death is sweeter than to continue to live and bury our children while White folks give the killers hamburgers. Death is sweeter than watching us slaughter each other to the joy of a 400-year-old enemy. Death is sweeter. The Qur’an teaches persecution is worse than slaughter then it says, retaliation is prescribed in matters of the slain. Retaliation is a prescription from God to calm the breasts of those whose children have been slain. If the federal government will not intercede in our affairs, then we must rise up and kill those who kill us, stalk them and let them feel the pain of death that we are feeling,” I have noticed that many white Twitter users and bloggers have sought to mislabel this as Farrakhan’s call for a race war. Popular internet personalities Glenn Beck and Alex Jones have also propagandized the Minister’s words in this way. Some bloggers are openly calling for the Minister to be arrested for inciting violence. Yet it is crystal clear that the Minister is not encouraging the Black community towards the posture of the aggressor. He is rightfully instructing us to be willing to defend our life to the fullest. His message is an exhortation to self-preservation. In the above quote the Minister is really articulating what lies within the popular slogan “Black Lives Matter.” For Black lives must matter in the minds of those who desire to kill Black people. They must know that if they carry out their desire, it will come at the cost of their own life. The Minister’s exhortation to self-preservation is the same message that every gun owner and believer in the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment believes in and practices. Numerous articles were written when President Barack Obama first came into office about how gun sales and ammunition sales were on the rise in the period just before he took office. The conservative community, which is largely white and rural, are the largest demographic of gun owners. Many have pledged to both kill and die to preserve their right to bear arms. The right to bear arms in America is considered by most to be a fundamental right that they are unwilling to even discuss doing away with despite the rise of gun related crimes. The blog writers and Twitter users who have seized upon the Minister’s words are both seeking to make mischief and simultaneously expressing what might be considered the “mind of Cain.” I recall Minister Farrakhan teaching us once that our former slave masters and their offspring feared that 2 | An Exhortation to Self-Preservation
one day they would have to answer for their role in the destruction of the American Black man and woman. They fear as Cain did when he slew Abel in the Bible. Cain’s fear caused him to say in the Bible’s Genesis 4:14 “that every one that findeth me shall slay me.” So when Minister Farrakhan, a man who has proven that he has the magnetic appeal to cause millions of Black people to follow his directives, stands and says that “if you kill us, we will kill you,” that age old fear is triggered. And the result is their move to demonized the Minister and call for his arrest and murder. The Islamaphobes throughout the country have sought to highlight and make mischief with the Minister’s invoking the passage of scripture from the Holy Qur’an on the subject of retaliation. The passage in its entirety comes from the longest Surah(Chapter) of the Holy Qur’an, Surah 2 wherein we read in verse 178-179: “O you who believe, retaliation is prescribed for you in the matter of the slain: the free for the free, and the slave for the slave, and the female for the female. But if remission is made to one by his (aggrieved) brother, prosecution (for blood-wit) should be according to usage, and payment to him in a good manner. This is alleviation from your Lord and a mercy. Whoever exceeds the limit after this, will have a painful chastisement. And there is life for you in retaliation, O men of understanding, that you may guard yourselves.” The translator Maulana Muhammad Ali asks us to compare this to the Bible in Leviticus 24:19-21 wherein it reads: “Anyone who injures their neighbor is to be injured in the same manner: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The one who has inflicted the injury must suffer the same injury. Whoever kills an animal must make restitution, but whoever kills a human being is to be put to death.” The translator makes note that the “The Jewish law[found in the Bible] of retaliation is greatly modified in Islam, being limited only to cases of murder, while among the Jews it extended to all cases of grievous hurt. The words retaliation is prescribed for you in the matter of the slain, mean that the murderer should be put to death. After promulgating that law in general terms, the Qur’an proceeds to describe a particular case, for example, that if a free man is the murderer, he himself is to be slain; if a slave is the murderer, that slave is to be executed; if a woman murdered a man, it was she that was to be put to death. The pre-Islamic Arabs used in certain cases to insist, when the person killed was of noble descent, upon the execution of others besides the murderer; they were not content with the execution of the slave or the woman, if one of them happened to be the murderer. The Holy Qur’an abolished this custom. There may be circumstances which alleviate the guilt. In such cases the murderer may be made to pay a fine to the relatives of the murdered person. Such money is called diyat or blood-money. The reference to the alleviation of the guilt is plainly contained in the concluding words of the verse: This is an alleviation from your Lord.” The translator makes an important distinction between the Jewish law found in the Torah (Old Testament) and the Holy Qur'an. His note that the harsher law is to be found in the Jewish text reminds me of a similar observation made by University of Pennsylvania Professor Philip Jenkins. 3 | An Exhortation to Self-Preservation
Professor Jenkins article entitled Dark Passages: Does the harsh language in the Koran explain Islamic violence? Don't answer till you've taken a look inside the Bible was written for the Boston Globe in March of 2009. According to Professor Jenkins, “in terms of ordering violence and bloodshed, any simplistic claim about the superiority of the Bible to the Koran would be wildly wrong. In fact, the Bible overflows with "texts of terror," to borrow a phrase coined by the American theologian Phyllis Trible. The Bible contains far more verses praising or urging bloodshed than does the Koran, and biblical violence is often far more extreme, and marked by more indiscriminate savagery. The Koran often urges believers to fight, yet it also commands that enemies be shown mercy when they surrender. Some frightful portions of the Bible, by contrast, go much further in ordering the total extermination of enemies, of whole families and races - of men, women, and children, and even their livestock, with no quarter granted. One cherished Psalms 137 begins with the lovely line, "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept"; it ends by blessing anyone who would seize Babylon's infants and smash their skulls against the rocks.” The mischief involving the distortion of Minister Farrakhan’s words is a part of the campaign to brand all Muslims as violent extremists and it is also a part of the campaign to demonize Black leaders that have not been approved of by the white powerful elite. Their out of context excerpting of the Minister’s message is actually the way they have historically handled our beloved Minister. For there is not one of the blogs or Twitter users who point to the Minister’s words in Miami who have offered to place his words within the context of his multi-themed hours long speech. Had they done so, they would have allowed the reader or viewer to bounce the Minister’s words on retaliation off of his comments regarding Black on Black crime and violence. Thanks to The Final Call Newspaper, we have other salient and powerful component passages of the Minister’s Miami message to consider. The Final Call’s coverage of the Minister’s Miami message included the following quote “How can we charge others with the crime of killing us without due process and lying about it when we are killing each other? And we won’t march on ourselves, nor will we even rise up to condemn ourselves for what we are doing to ourselves. And in the gangs when we kill we don’t talk, so nobody is arrested and charged with murder and brought to what is called justice.” If one were to compare and contrast both quotes, it would be clear that the Minister is not exempting Blacks who murder other Black people from the scriptures prescription of retaliation. And statistically since more Black people are murdered by other Black people it would seem as though the white community would laud the Minister’s words on retaliation. Because if we are going to “kill those who kill us,” we will end up killing quite an array of different killers, where the greater percentage would be the Black victimizers of other Black people. This false controversy over the Minister’s exhortation to Black self-preservation is really a ruse, artifice and trick. It seeks to hide and cover-up the part of the Minister’s message that the powerful forces in business and government really fear. And by this, I refer to the Minister’s call for a Christmas holiday boycott. Similar to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s insistence that Black people “re-distribute the 4 | An Exhortation to Self-Preservation
pain” of injustice, Minister Farrakhan prescribed to his enthusiastic audience the idea of massive economic withdrawal from the merchants and bankers who make their largest profits each year during the Christmas season. We might describe it as ‘Retaliatory Economic Justice.’ He instructed that we do not buy any gifts and presents and for this to begin with the ‘Black Friday’ sales holidaythe day after Thanksgiving. He made a powerful case that this year we make Christmas once again about the love and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. His call was essentially for a “mass” of Black people to adopt of the principles of Jesus-the Christ. This is the same Jesus who is pictured in scripture as running the corrupt merchants or “money-changers” out of God’s holy temple. From Minister Farrakhan’s point of view, justice for the Black man and woman will remain ever elusive until the modern merchants and “money-changers” experience the pain of economic loss and injury. Distortions, out of context quotes, omissions and out-right lies comprise the schedule of offenses in the long legacy of abuse that the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has suffered from the media. In 1997 Unitarian Universalist the Rev. Dr. William E. Alberts of Boston Massachusetts authored a trailblazing critique of the media’s handling of Minister Farrakhan that documents the mischief of some of America’s major news organs in the coverage of Minister Farrakhan. On page 29 of Rev. Alberts's report entitled Mainstream media as guardian of racial hierarchy: A Study of the Threat Posed by Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Million Man March we learn the collusion between the major newspapers and the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith. This section of the report addresses the Jewish community’s charges that Minister Farrakhan praised Adolph Hitler by calling him a “very great man.” The report cites a March 11, 1984 radio broadcast made by Minister Farrakhan that included the following commentary: “Here comes the Jews don’t like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that’s a good name. Hitler was a very great man. He wasn’t great for me as a Black person, but he was a great German. Now I’m not proud of Hitler’s evil against the Jewish people, but that’s a matter of record. He rose Germany up from nothing. Well, in a sense you could say there’s similarity in that we are rising our people up from nothing, But don’t compare me with your wicked killers.” According to Rev. Alberts's report, the Minister’s statement of Hitler being a “great” man is no different than when author William L. Shirer wrote in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich “Adolph Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon…” Shirer was honored by Israel before his death in 1993. Rev. Alberts also discusses the intentional editing of the Ministers’ quote on Hitler by ADL ‘s Alan Schwartz who was at the time the ADL’s assistant director or research. Schwartz’s was challenged by Boston Globe writer David Nyhan when he found that their allegations against the Minister omitted 2 important sentences that the Minister stated that greatly help contextualize his comments regarding Hitler. In the ADL’s re-publishing of the Minister’s words they intentionally omitted the sentence “Now I’m not proud of Hitler’s evil against the Jewish people,” and “Don’t compare me with your wicked killers.” 5 | An Exhortation to Self-Preservation
This was done intentionally so that the ADL could label the Minister as an anti-Semite which, because of Jewish power and influence, would dog the Minister’s trail for decades into the future. This current episode of seeking to sensationalize an out of context quote from Minister Farrakhan is competing to be the new deceptive reporting that gives birth to the contemporary false characterization of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan. As the millennial generation awakens to view Minister Farrakhan as a leader that they can follow, forces are at work to confine the Minister again in a prison of public opinion. These forces are working to undo the gains being made by the Minister’s message among the young that have been greatly facilitated by seminal events over the last few months. Events such as The Breakfast Club interview, the Sway In The Morning Interview, The Big Boy Interview and the social media publishing of scores of photographs displaying young Hip Hop artists and Reality TV stars embracing the Minister have broadened his ever increasing appeal. As a closing thought on the Minister’s words during this current controversy, I include the words of Jewish Rabbi Bruce E. Khan of Baltimore’s Temple Shalom. He attended the Million Man March in 1995. And despite his disagreements with the Minister’s criticism of the Jewish community’s relationship with the Black community, his introduction to Rev. Alberts’s report offers a relevant defense of Minister Farrakhan in this current controversy. Rabbi Khan wrote: “the people who listen to him do not go chasing down Jews, or gays or Whites or Koreans to beat them and murder them.” -30-
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