THE EDITOR, Sir:
I DECIDED to listen to the radio yesterday (Thursday) while driving to work this morning and tuned into the Breakfast Club. After quite a long segment on the continuing saga of NetServ with Audley Shaw as the call-in guest, we were then subjected to what I can only describe as the positively gushing duo of Beverly Manley and Tony Abrahams welcoming, exalting and hailing Minister Farrakhan as the latest Messiah and their next guest.
This was accompanied by constant entreaties for us all to fork out $5,000 to attend the forthcoming banquet being held at the Pegasus Hotel for the goodly Minister.
Mr. Farrakhan is, of course, entitled to his views but I heard not one probing or telling question posed to Mr. Farrakhan from either of the show's hosts.
Unless they are both failing in memory, Minister Farrakhan was, up until very recently a raging anti-Semite describing Jews with the kind of insults not fit for publication as well as his long-standing, well-documented venomous hatred of all white people.
Are we now to understand that everything has somehow changed? Almost overnight Louis Farrakhan has been reborn as the soft-spoken, all-encompassing Angel of Mercy under whose wings all races and creeds are now held dear. Quite a change of heart.
What, I wonder, does Minister Farrakhan have to say on the Islamic slave trade? Not a word apparently. As for Islam itself, as far as I can gather no critical analysis is even thought of, much less allowed. To do so is to invite a death penalty or "fatwah" on one's head.
I read a very interesting article in the UK's Guardian newspaper recently, online. A female journalist was interviewing young radical Muslim women living in the UK for an in-depth look at their current beliefs and attitudes. The journalist asked the Muslim women if they were comfortable with the fact that their revered Prophet Mohammed had 12 wives, one of whom, the supposed favourite 'Ai'sha', was a mere nine years old at the time of the marriage. The Muslim women did not and could not deny this fact but could only utter, "Well, um, in those times". I would have thought that in any time period or era, taking a nine-year-old bride was just a touch unacceptable.
Anyway, gush on Tony and Bev, you wouldn't get a job on the BBC's 'HARDtalk'! Wouldn't I love to see Tim Sebastian interview Farrakhan, it would certainly be more insightful than the fawning hero-worship I endured yesterday morning.
I am etc.,
CLAIRE MOREN
clairemoren@hotmail.com
