Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 25, 1994 TAG: 9403040011
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REED IRVINE and JOSEPH C. GOULDEN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The president chose not to focus attention on the fact that Colin Ferguson, the man who shot up that Long Island Railroad commuter train, was carrying notes that expressed his hatred of whites and Asians. This was mentioned in the first news stories, but it quickly dropped from view. The commentators chose to describe Ferguson as deranged, not as an embittered young man driven by racial hatred. The question of what malignant forces inspired him was never asked, much less answered.
The notes he was carrying mentioned papers and tapes in his room. These might provide an answer to that question, but our efforts to find out more about those papers and tapes have been unsuccessful. Were they tapes of racist rappers? Were they publications of groups preaching racial hatred?
Was Colin Ferguson influenced by the likes of Khalid Muhammad, a senior aide to Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam? In a speech last November at Kean College in New Jersey, Muhammad was said to have drawn "applause and laughter" from the predominantly black audience when he called for giving whites until sundown to leave South Africa and then killing all who remained. He said, "We kill the women, we kill the children, we kill the babies. We kill the blind, we kill the crippled, we kill 'em all. ... You say, why kill the babies in South Africa? Because they gonna grow up one day to oppress our babies, so we kill the babies." He defended the Nazi Holocaust and his harangue included references to "Jew York City" and "Columbia Jewniversity."
Just as President Clinton avoided alluding to the racial hatred that inflamed Colin Ferguson, our media ignored Khalid Muhammad's racist hatemongering for two months. It was not until the Anti-Defamation League published excerpts of his speech in a full-page ad in The New York Times on Jan. 16 that it attracted national attention. Only then did it evoke any criticism from black leaders such as Jesse Jackson, Ben Chavis of the NAACP and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who called upon Farrakhan to repudiate his aide's remarks.
Farrakhan's first reaction was to charge in a speech to an audience of 10,000 in Harlem that the government and some black leaders were trying to use Muhammad's words to divide his organization. When the pressure mounted, Farrakhan denounced the tone of Muhammad's remarks but said he stood by the "truths" that he had uttered. Farrakhan obviously believes that Muhammad was saying things that have a strong appeal to his followers. While he suspended this advocate of mass murder, he did so with such praise that Muhammad's feelings were not injured in the least. And those of us who believe that ideas have consequences were not reassured in the least.
Our leaders and our media have ignored the burgeoning of black racist hatred for years. They have concentrated their attention on combating white racist hatred, treating it as one of the major problems facing our country. Colin Ferguson found a way to express his hatred of whites, adopting Mao's dictum that power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
Patricia Turner, a black associate professor at the University of California, has written a book titled "I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture," published by the University of California Press. In it, she presents a sickening and frightening collection of "the preposterous anti-white beliefs common among blacks." Here are some examples from a review in the American Renaissance newsletter:
"During the 1980s and even up to the present, many blacks firmly believed that the Church's Fried Chicken Fast food chain was owned by the Klan and that its food was doctored to sterilize black men."
"More than half of all blacks are either convinced that the government supplies illegal drugs to blacks or that it might well be doing so."
"The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was said to be behind the Atlanta child murders of the late 1970s and early 1980s. ... The CDC employed the FBI to do the killings, because an essential ingredient for the manufacture of wonder drugs could be obtained only by extracting it from the sex organs of young blacks." Turner writes that "comedian" Dick Gregory helped promote that rumor.
These rumors gain currency because of the basic belief of so many blacks in "white wickedness," something that Professor Turner herself accepts. She cannot bring herself to admit that these black beliefs are aberrant or deplorable. She sees them as "tools of resistance" that give blacks "a sense of power." That spells trouble down the road.
\ Reed Irvine and Joseph C. Goulden write for Accuracy in Media, a media watchdog group.
by CNB