Farrakhan, Russell Simmons, and the ADL

by Jackie Muhammad

The new head of B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has ignited a firestorm of controversy between members of the Jewish community, Hip Hop impresario Russell Simmons, and The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the new CEO of the ADL, posted a blog on the Huffington Post website on March 17, 2016. Mr. Greenblatt’s blog was in response to a posting by Russell Simmons in which Mr. Simmons praised the work of the Nation of Islam and credited The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan with saving his life and the lives of thousands of Black men and boys throughout the nation. Simmons then called for reconciliation between the Jewish community and Minister Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.

The ADL argues that it has been at the forefront of the civil rights movement since its inception. The reality is that the Jews have been at the forefront and in control of most of our prominent civil rights organizations, but the question is, “What was their motive in the creation and control of these civil rights groups?”

For the answer let’s turn to the esteemed professor, historian, and lecturer, the late Tony Martin. According to Dr. Martin, some of the founders of the NAACP were not only prominent Jews but actually leaders of the American Zionist movement.

You had the leaders of the American Zionist movement founding the NAACP. Could you imagine if Marcus Garvey had founded the ADL? Would anybody have taken Marcus Garvey seriously as a pan-Africanist if he had founded the American Jewish Committee? They would have instantly looked at his motivation for so doing. Now we have discovered what the motivation is. Even as I speak, for the last 2 or 3 months amazing revelations have been coming out in the press, revelations suggesting that Joel Spingarn, the Jewish chairman of the NAACP, was actually spying on his own Black NAACP membership—spying for US military intelligence. What kind of liberal was that? …. These are the exact words of Garvey: “The [white] liberals in the NAACP are spies for the rest of the white race.”

A short list of some of the Jews who founded/directed/steered the NAACP include the following:

1. Joel Spingarn
2. Arthur Spingarn
3. Julius Rosenthal
4. Henry Malkewitz
5. Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch
6. Lillian Wald
7. Kivie Kaplan
8. Nathan Margold
9. Jack Greenberg
10. Julian Mack
11. Henry Moskowitz
12. Herbert Hill
13. Louis Marshall
14. Rabbi David Saperstein
15. Rabbi Stephen Wise

Was Dr. Martin correct and what does that have to do with the ADL, Russell Simmons, and Minister Farrakhan?

The first name on the above list of Jewish leaders of the NAACP is Joel Spingarn. Spingarn was one of the most influential and controversial leaders of the NAACP. Spingarn was an Austrian Jew and chairman of the NAACP from 1914 to 1919 and its president in 1930. The sordid aspect of Mr. Spingarn’s leadership, however, is that he operated a network of spies within the Black community under the direction of the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Division (MID). As an advocate of integration Spingarn was a fierce critic of Booker T. Washington and Marcus M. Garvey, both advocates of self-reliance and economic independence for America’s Black disenfranchised.

The Jews who controlled the civil rights organizations fostered and promoted integration, non-self-reliance, and a concept called non-economic liberalism—that is, they rejected our desire to control the economy of our own community and instead made us rely on them for our economic survival. That is a strategy that is employed even to this very day. Why? Because they see themselves as the masters of our economy—and our economic empowerment is viewed as a direct threat to themselves.

The spy network that Spingarn coordinated was a precursor to both the FBI-led COINTELPRO—headed by another Jew, Alex Rosen, Assistant Director of the FBI and the architect of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program—and the ADL’s own spy network. Rosen and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover spied on Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) and a host of other noted Civil Rights leaders and Black Revolutionaries. The FBI’s dastardly deeds very likely led to the deaths of some of the victims of this spy network.

 

Recent investigations have exposed just how extensive the ADL Spy operation has been. In his book titled The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront, Dr. Martin revealed:

Beginning in early 1993, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner and other papers ran a large number of stories on the apparently illegal spying operations of the ADL on the West Coast and across the country…. Organizations targeted by the ADL ranged from the Ku Klux Klan to Arab-American groups to Mills College, Greenpeace and a variety of Black organizations. Black (and part-Black) targets included the African National Congress (of South Africa), … NAACP, the Nation of Islam, African Black Students Organization of San Francisco State University, African National Reparations Organization, American Muslim Mission, Black Consciousness Movement of Azania, Black Studies Department of San Francisco State University, Black United Fund, … National Conference of Black Lawyers, … Rainbow Coalition, …The Black Scholar magazine…U.S.–Grenada Friendship Society, Women of Color Resource Project…and others, including several anti-apartheid organizations….

The League illegally spied on close to 1000 political, religious, labor and civil rights organizations and some 12,000 or more individuals across America.

What’s more, the ADL leadership acknowledged that

[T]hey had long supplied information (often with a view to harming those they did not like), to the FBI, police departments, the press, academics, librarians and other entities. What emerged now was a picture of confidential sources within police departments feeding classified information to the ADL, free junkets for police officials to Israel and the ADL itself as a sort of private FBI, keeping tabs on a wide assortment of individuals and groups. Most disturbing were the indications that the ADL and its operatives collaborated with and sold information to the secret services of South Africa and Israel…. [T]he ADL boasts of its influence on legislatures (e.g., re the passage of hate crime legislation modeled on ADL drafts), and on their training of police departments…

As it relates specifically to the Nation of Islam, in 1990 it was discovered that a confidential FBI investigative file on the NOI had been sold to intelligence agents of the racist, apartheid government of South Africa. In short, a double agent in the employ of the ADL and the FBI was selling secrets on a domestic American organization to a foreign government.

Howard University’s student newspaper, The Hilltop, was so upset after learning about the ADL’s duplicity, that it vilified the ADL for its interference in Black affairs. When the students learned that the ADL had spied on Dr. Martin Luther King, the NAACP, the Nation of Islam, as well as a host of other Black organizations, they proceeded to portray the ADL in a cartoon as a “devil.” ADL’s regional director at the time was David C. Friedman. The paper similarly characterized Mr. Friedman as a “pariah” when he appeared on America’s premier Black university campus.

The characterization of the ADL as a demon by America’s Black intellectual elite is synonymous with the Hebrew prophets’ description of the Jewish community of the Bible, a people castigated for their hardhearted, stiff-necked rebellion against God Himself.

Even though the ADL has demonized Minister Farrakhan for statements he never made, the ADL has been willing to forgive politicians, religious leaders, and even other Jews who have actually committed anti-Semitic acts in word and deed, but unwilling to even speak to The Minister. For example, according to tapes released by the Nixon Presidential Library, Pres. Richard Nixon called for the IRS to audit the “big Jewish contributors to the Democrats,” he leveled accusations against the “Jewish cabal,” and he made references to “Jews that are stealing in every direction.”

Nixon, in a taped conversation with the Rev. Billy Graham, concurred with Graham’s statement that “The nation’s problem lies with ‘satanic Jews.’”  The ADL excused his anti-Semitism because of his support of Israel. It said, “He was a great man who was flawed.” Was this “great man” also flawed when he agreed with Henry Kissinger that “if they put Jews in gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern,” and “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy”? The ADL’s policy is to cut the real anti-Semites some slack, but metaphorically slap Farrakhan for his strong and uncompromising stances.

Mr. Russell, a man with a beautiful spirit and a gentle heart, was seeking to bring about reconciliation between Min. Farrakhan, a man who has been asking for dialogue with the Jews for decades, and Mr. Greenblatt’s predecessor, Abraham Foxman, only to be repeatedly rebuffed and rejected by the ADL leadership. What Mr. Simmons is slowly learning is that making Farrakhan a boogeyman is a tactic the ADL has employed for years as a means to fundraise for the organization. The ADL’s own research has revealed that the NOI is not anti-Semitic, but it continues to perpetuate that narrative to expand its coffers.

Also, Mr. Simmons is perhaps beginning to realize that his kind words do not resonate with a people that the prophets condemn as being hardhearted, stiff-necked, and rebellious. In the Book of Acts (7:51), Stephen the Disciple condemns the Jews for being “a stiff necked (stubborn) people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you.” Isaiah called them “Stubborn of heart” (Isaiah 46:12), and in Exodus 39:2 God Himself said, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people.” Jesus added, “My word has no place with you” (John 8:37).

If the words of Jesus have no place in them, then how will Russell Simmons’s words resonate with them? The moral cowardice the ADL leadership exhibits has been condemned by Micah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Moses, Abraham, Jesus, and Muhammad.

The lack of integrity exhibited by the Jewish leadership of the civil rights organizations and their spying on our organizations disqualify them from entering into civilized dialogue with men who exhibit such moral fortitude as Mr. Simmons and The Minister. Our time may be better spent organizing our efforts to carry out the commands that Minister Farrakhan gave to Black America at Saviours’ Day 2016. Mr. Simmons may want to convene artists and entertainers to push forward the Cultural Revolution that The Minister called for at SD 2016.

(Jackie Muhammad is a former presidential appointee, member of the Oxford round table, educator, youth-trainer and businessman and member of the Nation of Islam Research Group.)