Date: Thu, 09 Aug 2001 09:57:34 -0700 From: spooner@gbis.com (Rick Tompkins/Kathy Harrer) Subject: [lpaz-repost] When God puts you in the ovens, it's forever To: lpaz-repost@yahoogroups.com Cc: jbuttric@superiorcourt.maricopa.gov, cartero@nguworld.com, ernesthancock@home.com, hlm5703@blackfoot.net, hotlead@ix.netcom.com, kvc@tima.com, libertymls@yahoo.com, lneil@ezlink.com, deke@castleman.reno.nv.us, mikeh@cybertrails.com, obiewan@sd.fastq.com, pjeney@aol.com, quixote@netzone.com, randerso@goodnet.com, sandyh@cybertrails.com
I'd say this is deserving of rather wide dissemination. Interesting spotlight on American media, "what"? Rick
>Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 17:29:13 -0500 (CDT)
>From: Boris Kupershmidt <bkupersh@utsi.edu>
>X-Sender: bkupersh@ent3500
>To: Undisclosed recipients: ;
>Subject: When God puts you in the ovens, it's forever
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>
>http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/columnists/columnist.html?c=%27mark%
>20steyn%27
>
>August 7, 2001
>
>It's okay to call this black man 'nutso'
>U.K. papers mock the Farrakhan idiocies that U.S. media won't touch
>
>Mark Steyn National Post
>
>You can't blame Louis Farrakhan, the man behind the 1995 Million Man March
>in Washington, for seeking to have lifted the ban on his entry to the
>United Kingdom. And you can't blame Britain's High Court for last week's
>decision approving his petition. Indeed, the only wonder is that he was
>ever banned in the first place. After all, the Nation of Islam's leader
>can produce any number of glowing testimonials. "I have respect for him,"
>said Al Gore's running mate, Joe Lieberman. Minister Farrakhan's message,
>said Jack Kemp, the 1996 Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, is
>"wonderful."
>
>This would be the message that Judaism is the "Synagogue of Satan"? Ah,
>well, let's not get hung up on details. Senator Lieberman is an Orthodox
>Jew, but that doesn't mean he can't "respect" a guy who thinks Hitler is
>"a great man" and advises Joe's crowd to try figuring out what they did to
>bug him. "Everybody talks about what Hitler did to you," Farrakhan pointed
>out in 1994. "What did you do to Hitler? What made that man so mad at
>you?" Senator Lieberman passed on that one, but did say recently that he
>feels sure the Minister "doesn't want to be a divisive figure." Thank
>goodness for that.
>
>Thus, the complicated dynamic of American racial politics, of which
>Britain, for all its other woes, is blessedly free. It has black
>government ministers, black members of the House of Lords, black network
>news anchors, black pop stars and black sporting heroes, but no permanent
>elite of black grievance-mongers. On the sliding scale of African-American
>community leaders, Minister Farrakhan does not have the mainstream
>respectability of Jesse Jackson, the race industry's highest-earning
>shakedown artist, nor even of the Reverend Al Sharpton, the corpulent
>bouffant charlatan to whom Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and all other
>Democratic candidates in New York must pay court. Yet arguably Farrakhan
>speaks for more of the African-American community than either of them.
>
>According to one poll, 59% of blacks think Farrakhan "speaks the truth."
>According to another, 40% of the participants at his 1995 Million Man
>March said they had negative feelings about Jews. That's an impressive
>result, not because of the proportion in and of itself but because that's
>the number who felt sufficiently relaxed about their "negative feelings"
>to admit them cheerfully to The Washington Post. In fairness to the Nation
>of Islam, they don't just offend Hymies. At a "Black Holocaust
>Conference," one of Farrakhan's lieutenants, a "Professor of Egyptology,"
>held up a painting of the Last Supper and called Christ's Disciples "a
>whole lot of white faggot boys".
>
>When the High Court lifted the ban on Farrakhan, Fleet Street was roused
>to one of its instant fits of indignation. But to get steamed up about
>Farrakhan's bigotry is to miss the point: The Minister's status rests on
>blacks remaining a permanent victim class, and it's hard to be a victim
>unless someone's victimizing you. Farrakhan's attacks on Jews in
>particular and "white devils" in general are not just entirely logical,
>but also an excellent career move. The media have yet to record a single
>occasion when the Minister's anti-Semitic diatribes before his large black
>audiences have been met with a solitary boo. At Madison Square Garden, the
>line advising Jews to "remember, when God puts you in the ovens, it's
>forever" was, in fact, a big hit.
>
>But let it go, I say. Objecting to Farrakhan as a bigot overlooks the more
>basic objection that he's a fruitcake. His Million Man March brought at
>least half that number to Washington, to stand in the street listening to
>a two-hour Farrakhan speech, in the course of which the former calypso
>singer went into a medley of his favourite numbers: "There in the middle
>of this Mall is the Washington Monument, 555 feet high. But if we put a
>one in front of that 555 feet, we get 1555, the year that our first
>fathers landed on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, as slaves. In the
>background is the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorial. Each one of these
>monuments is 19 feet high. Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president, Thomas
>Jefferson the third president, and 16 and three make 19 again. What is so
>deep about this number 19? Why are we standing on the Capitol steps today?
>That number 19, when you have a nine, you have a womb that is pregnant,
>and when you have a one standing by the nine, it means that there's
>something secret that has to be unfolded ..."
>
>You don't have to be a numerologist to spot the flaw in this theory: One
>secret that's easily unfolded is that in 1555 there were no black slaves
>on the shores of Jamestown, and no permanent immigrant settlements
>anywhere in North America; Jamestown wasn't settled until 1607, and no
>slaves arrived until 1619. But if nine is the pregnant womb and one is the
>known number of Jesse Jackson's love children, then six minus one equals
>five, and $5-million is the interest-free loan Colonel Muammar Gaddafi
>gave Farrakhan to start his "Power Inc" company in 1985, and if you
>multiply 5 by 19 you get 95, take away the 16, you're left with 79, which
>equals Farrakhan's two stately homes in the Chicago area plus his 77-acre
>rural retreat. Coincidence? Unlikely.
>
>By the time Farrakhan had moved on to explain why the 440 cycles of the A
>tone in music were reminders of Egypt in the Eighteenth Dynasty, the U.S.
>media knew they had a problem. The Minister has always had his whimsies --
>he claims that once a month he's taken up into a spaceship orbiting the
>Earth to commune with Elijah Muhammed -- but faced with a man talking
>gibberish to the biggest gathering in Washington in decades, the American
>press froze. You can say a man's dangerous and demagogic, but, if you
>point out he's a loonytoon, what does that make the huge tide of people
>hanging on his every word? What does that make the popular black magazines
>like EBONY, which hailed him as one of the 20th century's "immortal
>giants," or JET, which is as punctilious about his status as the Court
>Circular is about the Queen Mum's ("The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan
>Celebrates His 68th Birthday" ran the headline last month)? What does that
>make the leading black academics who were drooling all over the speech? It
>was, said Harvard's Cornel West, "depths of black love speaking to depths
>of black suffering." Black love, black suffering, we all love that
>storyline. But black nuttiness? No way. So the major newspapers declined
>to report the Minister's numerological excursions, treating those portions
>of the speech like Victorian piano legs and obscuring them with discreet
>ellipses. The New York Times allowed that Mr. Farrakhan's address was
>"complex."
>
>Racial politics in America is so toxic that white commentators can be
>respectful to, alarmed by or disappointed with a black leader but they
>cannot laugh at him. In the last week, every British national newspaper
>has gleefully mocked every Farrakhan idiocy; after decades of coverage,
>they've yet to be reported in the major American papers. What happens when
>it's deemed unseemly to point out how risible someone is? Farrakhan may
>never achieve his goal of a separate black nation, but he's already
>leading the way to a separate black reality, where the facts of whitey's
>world go unrecognized, and instead it's taken for granted that the AIDS
>virus was invented by the CIA to kill blacks. Some on the right insist
>that, underneath the overheated rhetoric, he's an exemplary social
>conservative; some on the left admire him as a pioneer of Balkanized
>identity-group politics long before they were popular. But to all but the
>most partisan observers Minister Farrakhan presents a more basic
>conundrum: How nutso does an African-American community leader have to be
>before his fellow blacks hoot with derision and walk away?
>
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