Sensation-seeking media and other misguided Americans, some claiming to defend civil rights in a threatened nation, have teamed up again, this time transforming Minister Louis Farrakhan from a national pest to a global menace.
Farrakhan's "world friendship" tour to several Muslim countries and his calculated slurs against white America have had the impact Farrakhan - or any other professional hate peddler - would intend.He's made himself more famous, and he's made white people mad again, some of them imagining that this showman who turned a storefront religion into a moneymaker is not just insulting them but he's coming to get them, or he's sending somebody else to get them, maybe Muslim assassins from the Middle East.
Lords of the media are demanding almost on a daily basis that the State Department denounce Farrakhan and his travels and - as if there are no more serious concerns in the world - State Department flunkies have complied. Other flunkies from the Justice Department and Treasury have also expressed concerns at what Farrakhan's up to overseas and - surprise - a New York congressman, Republican Rep. Peter T. King, got out in front demanding a congressional investigation.
So this oddball of religious racism, who might otherwise be hawking his product on street corners and out of the trunk of his car, gets another free helping of fame from editors and reporters and organizational hucksters, most of whom pretend - just pretend - that Minister Farrakhan is up to serious and threatening business.
Sharing his wisdom with dependably anti-American Muslim leaders on his Middle East tour, Farrakhan was reported by an Iranian newspaper to have said that "God will destroy America at the hands of Moslems."
In Iraq he laid down some dependable trump cards, calling the U.S.-sponsored economic sanctions against Iraq "wicked" and claiming that Iraqi people, because of the sanctions, were suffering much like European Jews suffered under Nazi Germany.
Daring more criticism from other Americans and as if to ennoble his rantings, Farrakhan was also quoted as telling a Middle East audience: "I am a free black and do not allow anyone to tell me where to go and where not to go, and who to meet or not to meet."
There is considerable irony in Farrakhan's rise from an obscure leader of an obscure sect to a world class menace whose race-tinged pronouncements set congressmen and Cabinet undersecretaries tingling with official bad vibes. It might be said with some accuracy he owes much of his fame and accumulating good fortune to Jewish people he's often used as his target, more specifically to the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith which in January 1994, denounced Farrakhan in full-page newspaper ads.
The actual target of the ads was a young apprentice quack in Farrakhan's following who, several weeks earlier at a small college in New Jersey, had spoken to a group of black students using dependable Farrakhan themes of anti-semitism, bigotry and hate. A tape recording of the talk found its way to the ADL and officials for the ADL - themselves as knowledgeable as Farrakhan in mind game manipulations - published excerpts from the tape as a shot back at Farrakhan proving he was still his old anti-semitic self.
And Farrakhan's star was on the rise. As the ADL ads generated angry criticisms of Farrakhan they also ginned up media discussion and defense of Farrakhan from blacks and other Americans, some who noted that, despite the hatefulness of his message, Farrakhan had a right to deliver it. Springing from that notoriety, Farrakhan moved into a leadership role of the "Million Man March" in Washington last fall and, despite his own long, mind-numbing speech, emerged as the increasingly famous racist religionist, perhaps wearing a new touch of eccentricity.
Now there's new fame building from his overseas adventure in which the Farrakhan nonsense is again carefully taken down to be published and filed away.
It would seem Farrakhan would some time have the decency and common courtesy to thank his benefactors in the media and in and out of government for what's now worldwide fame as the black man whose successful life's work is to make white people angry.