There is a problem with the Muammar Khadaffi reform movement: Nothing has been said about the dictator’s relationship with Reverend Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Is Khadaffi still financially backing Farrakhan, or is the love-fest all over?
Farrakhan is, of course, one of the world’s leading anti-Semites, an admirer of Adolf Hitler even. His newspaper, The Final Call, is openly anti-Semitic. His hate speech has paid off, though–big time. In 1985, Khadaffi presented Farrakhan with a $5-million-dollar loan. In 1996, after a tour of the Middle East, Farrakhan announced that he had received a Khadaffi pledge of $1 billion. One has to wonder how much of that billion has been delivered to the Nation of Islam. Maybe it’s been spent on travel instead: In 2002, Farrakhan visited Baghdad, where he was quoted declaring that “the Muslim American people are praying to the almighty God to grant victory to Iraq.”
In one of his many anti-Semitic speeches, Farrakhan referred to “the small number of Jewish people in the United States [who] exercise a tremendous amount of influence on the affairs of government.” He added that “black people will never be free in this country until they are free of that kind of control.” Farrakhan has even described Judaism as a “dirty religion.”
A Khadaffi-supported anti-Semitic movement in the United States among blacks in particular, is an interference in domestic affairs. Elimination of that support should be part of the new deal that the Libyan dictator has announced. Such an action is essential since, as Gabriel Schoenfeld writes in his just-published book, The Return of anti-Semitism,
opinion polls “have long shown that black Americans register the highest level of anti-Semitic attitudes of any subgroup in the United States….and a number of black political leaders appear not only unperturbed by Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism but prepared to make common cause with him on a range of issues.”
So the question for Khadaffi is this: Is he still helping to finance the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, friend and associate of the Rev. Al Sharpton, current presidential candidate? If so, maybe Khadaffi could stand to see a little CIA support for opposition groups in Libya.
–Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is author of Anti-American Myths: Their Causes and Consequences.