Is Help for Blacks, Hurt for Jews?
The Anti-Black World-view of Neil Steinberg
By Demetric Muhammad
On September 30 Neil Steinberg released the latest propaganda attack on the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Despite his intention to mislead his Chicago Sun-Times audience, Steinberg’s poisonous and uninformed article has created a teachable moment. I don’t know whether Steinberg is willing to learn, but I am definitely willing to teach.
His attack is strategically timed to be distributed in the immediate aftermath of Minister Farrakhan’s wonderfully successful tour of New York City for the promotion of peace and an end to gun violence. Black people should, by now, begin to notice that whenever strong and uncompromising voices of Black self-help and -determination begin to make progress, Zionist Jewish forces emerge to attack them. Any Black person that reads Steinberg’s rants against Minister Farrakhan must understand the lens through which Steinberg views the Minister and all Black people, for that matter.
Steinberg’s lens is apparently the Babylonian Talmud, which is a commentary on the Torah (Old Testament) written by early Jewish Rabbis. The Talmud says that Blacks are cursed by God to be servants to Jews and that Blacks are deemed to only have value as servants of Jews. Dr. Harold Brackman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote in his doctoral dissertation that Jewish Rabbis created the myth of the Curse of Ham:
“There is no denying that the Babylonian Talmud was the first source to read a Negrophobic content into the [Noahic] episode by stressing Canaan’s fraternal connection with Cush… The more important version of the myth, however, ingeniously ties in the origins of blackness — and of other, real and imagined Negroid traits — with Noah’s Curse itself.”
This anti-Black world view has been on display as recently as 2005, when the head of the Shas’s Council of Torah Sages in Israel, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, said that God sent Hurricane Katrina to destroy New Orleans because Blacks live there and were not studying enough Torah!
Moses Maimonides, who is called by the Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion “the symbol of the pure and orthodox faith,” wrote in his Guide to the Perplexed:
“…the Negroes found in the remote South, and those who resemble them from among them that are with us in these climes. The status of those is like that of irrational animals. To my mind they do not have the rank of men, but have among the beings a rank lower than the rank of man but higher than the rank of apes. For they have the external shape and lineaments of a man and a faculty of discernment that is superior to that of the apes.”
This is the lens through which Neil Steinberg views Black people. This is what Minister Farrakhan and all strong Black leaders in our history have had to fight. These anti-Black ideas have garnered wide acceptance even within the ranks of our own people. The poet Phyllis Wheatley wrote of her skin color as being a “diabolic dye.” The slave Jupiter Hammond is an example of the great harm the Hamitic myth has had upon the minds of Black slaves. He rebuked Blacks who earnestly desired freedom with these words:
“It may seem hard for us if we think our masters wrong in holding us slaves to obey in all things, but who of us dare dispute with God! He has commanded us to obey, and we ought to do it cheerfully and freely….for my own part I do not wish to be free; for many of us who are grown up slaves have always had masters to take care of themselves; and it may be for our own comfort to remain as we are.”
So if Blacks are cursed with Blackness and if Black people’s only purpose in life is to be a servant to the Jews, then any and all persons who seek to secure for Black people a different and more ennobled destiny must be attacked. This is why Steinberg and his ilk are busy demonizing the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan. Minister Farrakhan and Marcus Garvey are exponents of what is called Black Nationalism. And it is really Black Nationalism that Steinberg wants to equate with anti-Semitism.
But what is Black Nationalism? Nationalism, according to Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, “is a relationship among people with a common heritage and with common expectations. Land acquisition is merely the ultimate stage of nationalism. The consummation and crystallization of our aspirations into an organic and systemic instrument for emancipatory politics is the first objective of systematic nationalism. This process is accomplished through historically and culturally determined actions for national expression. It contradicts attempts at national oppression through the exploitative uses of culture, science, religion, and economics. Emancipatory politics is the keystone of nationalistic struggle. It liberates the mind from the duality of marginal existence. Nationalists are therefore capable of functioning in any situation. What is necessary, absolutely necessary, is an attachment to the national idea…The correctness of systematic nationalism stems from its assault on the twin evils of race and class exploitation. This, however, is not its philosophical grounding; it is rather its activist character.”
I don’t know any Black person that wouldn’t want this. In fact, I don’t know any Jewish person that would disagree with such an ideology. Black Nationalism actually mirrors what Jews have done to secure themselves. They have land, dual citizenship with Israel, economic strength and a resultant political strength. Jews are respected and admired for their economic strength, unity, culture and values concerning education and family life. The Black Nationalist view is that Black people deserve the same, yet our Jewish friends never steered us in that direction.
Joel Spingarn and the Jewish leaders of the NAACP directed Blacks to do the very opposite of what Jews do, and have done, to become successful in society. So the NAACP and most in the Civil Rights Movement adopted the philosophy Spingarn termed “non-economic liberalism”—which encouraged and fostered a beggar’s mentality in Blacks. It suggested that what Blacks desired and deserved of justice, equality and an overall better quality of life could only be achieved through picketing, marching and begging the government. This was never the model that Jews themselves employed. They developed strength through unity, self-love, entrepreneurship, and the establishment of Jewish enclaves all over America. These are the tenets that Brother Marcus Garvey, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Minister Louis Farrakhan have promoted for Black people.
Steinberg asked where has Minister Farrakhan led his Nation? I ask Mr. Steinberg, Where have Jews led Blacks? If the Jews’ involvement was so beneficial to the Black struggle, why isn’t the Black condition equal to the Jewish condition? Why don’t we hear of the plight of the Jewish male as there is a plight of the Black male? Why is there no Jew-on-Jew crime and violence like the Black-on-Black crime problem? I have yet to hear of a Jewish HIV epidemic like the Black HIV epidemic statistics trumpet. And the prison industrial complex appears to have no adverse effects on the Jewish community. It is clear that Jewish paternalism concerning Black issues is for the purpose of sabotage and not salvation. It is clear that Blacks have not been given the secret to the Jewish Phenomenon of success within American society.
Instead, Steinberg and the Zionist lobby are content to fight any strong and courageous Black person who seeks to help Black people out of the miserable condition of slavery, suffering and death. The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, Volume 2, contains a shocking list of Blacks that have at various times in their careers been labeled anti-Semites. Their only crime was advocating a position of Black self-help, an act viewed by Jews as being hurtful to Jewish interests.
Booker T. Washington
W.E.B. DuBois
Marcus Garvey
Martin L. King Jr.
Malcolm X
Hon. Elijah Muhammad
Nelson Mandela
Bishop Desmond Tutu
Julian Bond
Kwame Ture
Andrew Young
Kweisi Mfume
Rev. Al Sharpton
Rev. Jesse Jackson
Rev. Joseph Lowery
J.A. Rogers
James Baldwin
Richard Wright
Julius Lester
Alice Walker
Michael Jackson
Spike Lee
Ice Cube
Arsenio Hall
Muhammad Ali
Public Enemy
Oprah Winfrey
John Hope Franklin
Stevie Wonder
Toni Morrison
What Steinberg fears is the wide acceptance of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan by the masses of Black people. He had hoped that the Black masses had bought in to the notion of a “post-racial” America. He had expected that the election of a Black President of the United States of America would extinguish the light of Black people’s desire for freedom, justice and equality. Steinberg’s dream is that the Black community remains deprived of self-determination, unity and economic power. What Steinberg really wanted to write was how dumbfounded he is over the tenacity, durability and wide reach of Minister Farrakhan’s leadership. For it is the leadership of Minister Farrakhan that the masses of Black people now see as a torchlight, amid an ever-increasing darkness inside America.
Demetric Muhammad is in the student ministry class of Muhammad Mosque No. 55 in Memphis, Tennessee. He is also the author of In the Light of Scripture and A Complete Dictionary of the Supreme Wisdom Lessons. Reach him at https://researchminister.com/author/brotherdemetric/