FARRAKHAN - It's OK to laugh at him (loony tunes)

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Chicago Sun-Times

It's OK to laugh at Farrakhan

August 19, 2001

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

You can't blame Louis Farrakhan for seeking to have lifted the ban on his entry to the United Kingdom. And you can't blame Britain's High Court for their decision the other day 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 Sen. Joe Lieberman. Minister Louis 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. 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?'' 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 professional grievance-mongers. When the High Court lifted the ban on Farrakhan, the London press corps, most of which had never heard of the guy 10 minutes earlier, 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 audiences have been met with a solitary boo.

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 favorite 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 3 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 that Libyan leader Col. Moammar Ghadafi 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 18th Dynasty, the media knew they had a problem. The minister has always had his whimsies--his claim that once a month he's taken up into a spaceship orbiting the Earth to commune with Elijah Muhammed, etc.--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 leading black academics who were drooling all over the Million Man 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 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. Within a week of the High Court decision, every British national newspaper had gleefully mocked every Farrakhan idiocy; after decades in public life, 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 among his followers 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 wacky does an African-American community leader have to be before his fellow blacks hoot with derision and walk away?

-- Anonymous, August 19, 2001


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