"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
President of the Nation of Islam (NOI), Louis Farrakhan (1933 - ) is an American antisemitic and conspiracy preacher, advocating for the separation of Black and White people.
Born Louis Eugene Walcott, he was first a calypso singer before joining the Nation of Islam in 1955. He quickly played a very important role in the organisation, whose unity he maintained when it was weakened by Malcolm X’s departure in 1964. Farrakhan said of him that “deserved to die”, less than two months before his assassination in 1965. After ideological differences within the NOI, he took control of it in 1978 and has since remained its undisputed leader.
Farrakhan has often been known for his racist and polemical positions against White people (whom he described in 2000 as “potential humans… they haven’t evolved yet”), moderate Black men and women, homosexuals, the United States and the West, but above all for his countless antisemitic statements, most of which have strong hints of conspiracy. These positions have brought him into contact with the American neo-Nazi movement, and more recently with the alt-right.
Farrakhan became friends with the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who financed the NOI and awarded him the “Muammar Gaddafi Human Rights Prize” in 1996. Farrakhan has also forged links with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Omar el-Bechir's Sudan and the Islamic Republic of Iran, a country he visited several times. Sensitive to the theses of Ron Hubbard, Farrakhan was awarded a prize by the Church of Scientology in 2006.
Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacres in Israel, Farrakhan has delivered genocidal messages to the Jewish state, claiming he received a divine revelation from the Great Wheel, hovering 40 miles above the Earth, that Benjamin Netanyahu staged the massacre. But his antisemitism goes back decades.
As early as 1974, he declared that the mass media was “under Jewish control” and asked Black politicians to “not submit to Jewish pressure”. By 1984 his comments began to attract significant attention, when he declared that “Hitler was a very great man” before calling Judaism a “dirty religion”. The theme of Jewish perfidy then became increasingly present in his speech, becoming omnipresent from the 1990s to the 2000s. Farrakhan considers the Jews, whom he often refers to as the “Synagogue of Satan,” as “impostors” who would have falsified the Bible to present themselves as the chosen people instead of the blacks. He declared in 2010 that “the Hebrews were originally black”.
Claiming in a 2019 speech that he wanted to “separate the good Jews from the Satanic Jews” he referred to his “enemies” as the “evil people in the Jewish community who run America, run the government, run the world, own the banks, own the means of communication." [archive] In 1990, for example, he blamed the Jews for exerting “control (over) the movement of this great nation, like a radar controls the movement of a great ship in the waters. … The Jews got a stranglehold on the Congress”, in 1997 for having “wrapped your (their - the Jews) tentacles around the US government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell,” or in 2015 for “working for years to control your representatives in Congress, in the Senate, in the House of Representatives.” In 2018, Farrakhan again stated that “The Jews have control over those agencies of government. When you want something in this world, the Jew holds the door.”
When he is not openly talking about the Jews, it is the “Zionists” that he attacks: “That's what the UN, the US and Europe doesn't want to deal with because the Zionists have control in England, in Europe, in the United States and around the world” (1996); “Zionists dominate the government of the United States of America and banking system” (2011). He also asserted in a 1998 interview, that the Monica Lewinsky affair was a manipulation by Zionists against Bill Clinton to get back at him for making too many demands on Israel.
In a disturbing analogy to Nazi rhetoric accusing Jews of being “warmongers” Farrakhan declared in 2010 that if the United States attacks Iran, “it'll be because the Zionists have pushed Obama to do [...] a war for the Ashkenazi false Jews that have come out of Europe.” In 2004, he claimed that “Ariel Sharon is leading America to go to war against Iraq”. In 2012, he accused Israel of provoking the civil war in Sudan. The following year, he became more threatening: “Remember that if you use your immense power and influence to lead the United States to war again, it will be the end of your power as a Jewish people everywhere.”
The Nation of Islam posts videos of Farrakhan's speeches on its YouTube page with evocative titles, such as "The Conspiracy of the U.S. Government".
Farrakhan has repeatedly questioned al-Qaeda's responsibility for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which he called as early as 2003 “a war that had been planned to bring a pipeline through Afghanistan to bring oil from that region, oil owned by Unical of which Dick Cheney is a stock holder.” In 2015, he asserted that “there were many Israelis and Zionist Jews in key roles in the 9/11 attacks… It now appears that 9/11 was a false flag operation…”. In 2016, he clarified his thinking by stating that the ones at the origin of the 9/11 operations were part of the “Synagogue of Satan” and that “no Muslim took control of no plane”.
Farrakhan has also been notable for his multiple outbursts against homosexuality. According to him, the West and/or the Jews are secretly trying to impose this way of life on Blacks to prevent them from procreating. In 2006, for example, he stated that “These false Jews promote the filth of Hollywood that is seeding the American people and the people of the world and bringing you down in moral strength…It's the wicked Jews the false Jews that are promoting lesbianism, homosexuality. It's wicked Jews, false Jews that make it a crime for you to preach the word of God, then they call you homophobic!”. The ADL has done a good job in collecting some of his homophobic outbursts.
He also said that "brother Barack (Obama), under Jewish influence, is trying to introduce same-sex marriage in Africa, [...] the Western man says 'If you want this money from the World Bank, from the IMF, you have to make laws that allow same-sex marriage.'" Then, later, he explained that "the Jews are responsible for all this defilement and degenerate behavior that Hollywood promotes, which turns men into women and women into men." He has repeatedly claimed that water and food in black neighborhoods are tampered with to chemically sterilize African Americans and/or turn them into homosexuals. He has also spread the accusation, made by a Nation of Islam follower, that the US government and the “Synagogue of Satan” were using chemically modified cannabis to "de-virilize and feminise" black men in the United States.
Farrakhan is indeed convinced that there is a "conspiracy by our government against the black man," in his 1997 words. In 2005, while visiting Charlotte, North Carolina, he said of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina that he "heard from a very reliable source that underneath that levee was a 25-foot hole, which suggested that it had been blasted so that water could destroy the black parts of the city, while where white people lived it would stay dry." A grand conspiracy against blacks in which Jews would assist, while Farrakhan, since the 1990s, has repeatedly repeated the false accusation that Jews played a central role in the slave trade and slavery.
In 1994, he declared, “I don't own Hollywood. Who depicted black people? Who writes the books? Who writes the plays, the songs that make us look less than human? Do you mean to tell me that Jews have never done any evil to black people?” or “Were they not involved in the slave trade? Yes, they were ... and to the extent that they were involved, somebody has to bring them to account. And I believe that has fallen on me.”
In 2018, he said that "many of our people who go to Hollywood to try their luck have to submit to sodomy and all sorts of debauchery, to get a small part. That's what we call 'couch promotion.' You see, that's Jewish power."
Louis Farrakhan defends ambiguous positions regarding the Holocaust, to say the least. In 1995, he claimed that “German Jews financed Hitler right here in America...International bankers financed Hitler and poor Jews died while big Jews were at the root of what you call the Holocaust...Little Jews died while big Jews made money. Little Jews [were] being turned into soap while big Jews washed themselves with it. Jews [were] playing violin, Jews [were] playing music, while other Jews [were] marching into the gas chambers…”
In a 2013 speech, Louis Farrakhan, referring to the situation in Zimbabwe, lamented that Westerners intentionally put poison in vaccines “to limit the population of Black people in those countries and places in the world where America’s needs for their vital minerals and resources were deemed necessary—in her mind—for her national interests; to keep America in the world as the “No. 1 superpower.”
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Farrakhan published a tweet in which he called for the rejection of vaccination, including mentioning a "conspiracy" that Bill Gates is allegedly a part of and denouncing “experiments” as well as a “depopulation” project. In his speech of July 4, 2020, he considers, among other things, that “Whites are born with murder and lies in their nature".
Farrakhan has received the support of many prominent American celebrities over the years, including show business stars, sports figures and politicians. The revelation that some key organisers of the Women's March feminist demonstrations after Donald Trump's election backed Farrakhan caused a scandal and shattered the movement in 2019. In June 2020, the actress Chelsea Handler was criticized for having relayed on social media a video of Farrakhan from 1990, in a post that was “liked” by several other famous actresses.
In early June 2019, Farrakhan was banned from YouTube. A month earlier, Facebook did the same. In June 2018, Louis Farrakhan had his Twitter account decertified after delivering a sermon in which he intended to “completely and thoroughly unmask the Satanic Jew and the Synagogue of Satan” in which he stated, among other things, that Jews want to “dominate” non-Jews and that they have “infected the entire world with poison and deception.”
(Last updated on 09/05/2024)
