Minister Farrakhan devoted most of his lengthy speech to castigating and defaming the United States and Israel.
• “You [United States] have planned a war. The war that you have planned, you and your generals, is to the Middle East, you want to use the Sunnis at the prodding of Israel, to attack Iran. Just like you did with my brother, [Libyan dictator Muammar Mohammed] Gadhafi, you laid back, leading from behind.”
Farrakhan’s baseless conspiracy theory ignores worldwide concern about Iran. The Iranian government is controlled by Islamist fanatics. Authoritative critics of the nuclear accord with Iran argue that the inspection and enforcement provisions are weak, allowing Iran to secretly continue working toward obtaining nuclear weaponry.
Iran continues today as the most active state sponsor of terrorism according to the U.S. State Department. The Lebanon-based Hezbollah terrorist group is mainly supported by Tehran. Iran seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held and abused 52 American diplomats for more than a year. In 1983, its agents blew up the American embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American soldiers and marines. In 1996, it blew up the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, murdering 19 American soldiers. Iran, via its Islamic Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah is believed to have been behind the 1994 attack on the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2011, senior Iranian officials plotted to blow up a Washington, D.C. restaurant to kill the Saudi ambassador. Iran is a brutal police state (it tortures and executes its own citizens in large numbers) controlled by Shi’ite Muslim clerics with an apocalyptic world-view. These clerics tout the necessity of a war of destruction with Israel and the West, in order to hasten the return of a messianic “twelfth imam.”
• “And you don’t want [North Korea’s dictator] Kim Jong-Un yet, but you’re looking for a softer target, and you think that’s Iran. Wrong. Wrong. If you permit Israel to push Saudis and the Sunnis into war with the Shiites, I want to say this to the Muslim world, see, you are so blinded that you think with America’s backing you can win. Wrong. You are a Muslim. If you’ve got the backing of Allah, you can win. But you don’t have that backing.”
• “And Israel, you are making America lose big-time. You don’t want me to say how much control AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] has over the U.S. government. And I know the press is here – you can’t even say it except you tell something ugly, so that your editors will give you leave. But brothers and sisters, let me tell you, you are going to be set free. Because that kind of cowardly newsperson who knows the truth and afraid to tell it, if you love this country you’ll tell the truth to change America for she is going down and fast.”
ssociation. While AIPAC is frequently vilified by haters of Israel, invariably overlooked is a lobbying heavy-weight, the petro-dollar funded anti-Israel pro-Arab lobby, and direct funding from Arab countries. This influence is felt not only on Capitol Hill, the State Department and Pentagon, through multi-billion dollar weapons purchases but also in academia, with large-scale grants to prominent universities and think tanks, and in society in general through subsidies and material support to mosques, religious schools and advocacy groups. Examples are: The Middle East Institute is largely funded by the United Arab Emirates; Brookings Institution receives sizable funding from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates; Saudi Arabia has donated millions of dollars to buy influence in U.S. universities.
Farrakhan is never one to let facts get in the way of his teaching. There is a continuous Jewish diaspora history from the Roman expulsions to the rebirth of Israel as a Jewish state, and modern DNA testing that strongly indicates both Jewish genealogical continuity and Middle Eastern origins of the vast majority of today’s Jews including the current Israeli and American Jewish populations. Furthermore, consider that today’s Israeli Jews, unlike Farrakhan and his followers, speak the same language (Hebrew) and worship the same God (of the Bible) as the ancient Israelis,
Moreover, neither the United States nor “the Jews” “pushed the Palestinians out to give the Jews a homeland.” History shows otherwise. First, the international legal right of the Jewish people to reconstitute their own state in their ancestral homeland (including the West Bank referred to biblically and historically as “Judea and Samaria”) was recognized by the Allied Powers of World War I at the 1920 San Remo conference. And the Jewish presence in the territory was recognized as legitimate in the Mandate for Palestine adopted by the League of Nations in 1922, which provided for the establishment of a Jewish state in the Jewish people’s homeland.
Furthermore until the 1948 War, the Jews often were called “Palestinians.” Until the 1960s, when local Arabs acquired national consciousness under Yasser Arafat, they were inclined to consider themselves “southern Syrians” or simply as Arabs. These Arabs were not pushed out.
[N]ot withstanding a limited number of tactical expulsions, “a people” was certainly not expelled…Roughly half of those fleeing did so between November 1947 (when Palestinian Arabs responded to the United Nations partition recommendation with anti-Jewish violence) and May 1948 (when the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon invaded Israel).
In large part, the Arab masses fled because they saw the Palestinian elite doing the same thing. In part, it was in response to exhortations by Arab military and political leaders that Palestinian civilians evacuate their homes until the end of the fighting. Vast numbers were simply fleeing the heavy fighting that surrounded them, or from a coming conflict which they expected to soon disrupt their lives. In some instances, Palestinians were forced from their homes by the Jewish military.
In a number of instances, the Jewish leadership appealed for the Arabs to stay put. The surprise announcement by the Palestinian leadership of Haifa that “the Arab population wished to evacuate” was immediately followed by a tearful plea by the town’s Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levy, for the leaders to reconsider…The British commander in Haifa, Hugh Stockwell, emphatically insisted that the Arabs were making a mistake, and also urged them to change their decision, which reportedly came from the Arab Higher Committee in Beirut.
Farrakhan’s history of defaming Jews and Israel includes: In 2015, Farrakhan told an audience, that Israelis and “Zionist Jews” played key roles in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that left nearly 3,000 people dead.
In 2004, Farrakhan told an audience that “The war in Iraq is not your war; that’s Israel’s war… using America’s power to destroy the enemies of Israel.”
In 1992, Farrakhan told an audience that whites
and Jews were “the pale horse with death as its rider and hell close behind” that had wreaked destruction on red, yellow, and black peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas as well as the Palestinians in the Middle East.
Providing anti-Israel propaganda platforms is standard procedure for C-SPAN. This broadcast was just more of the same.
The extent of the possible harm inflicted by C-SPAN is indicated by the fact that C-SPAN broadcasts reach a television audience of potentially millions.
When will TV providers (cable or satellite) that support C-SPAN come to terms with C-SPAN’s chronic journalism malpractice that is bound to fuel anti-Israel, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories? Keep in mind that a portion of the public’s cable/satellite fees is paid to C-SPAN.
When will Congress, which enfranchises C-SPAN, come to terms with the problem?