Leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan (left), past president and historian of the congregation of Isrealites in Jamaica, Ainsley Henriques and Ambassador Imam Douglas Owen-Ali (right) during a ceremony aimed at promoting friendship and unity between Jews and Moslems at the Jewish Synagogue on Duke Street, downtown Kingston, on Saturday. - Norman Grindley /Staff Photographer The following are excerpts of a speech by the Leader of the Nation of Islam, Minister Louis Farrakhan, during his visit to the Jewish Synagogue in downtown Kingston on Saturday. This was his first visit to a synagogue.
I AM eternally grateful that you have accepted our desire to worship with you this morning. Believe it or not for nearly 18 years we have tried to resolve the conflict between us and the Jewish community in America starting from the Jesse Jackson campaign; we contacted the head of the anti-defamation league in New York a Mr. Nathan Promato who was out of the city. I think he was in Rome at the time and we wanted to sit with him.
This was back in 1984. Mr. Promato came back after agreeing to meet with us, he sent me a letter saying that unfortunately he would not agree to meet with me. I wrote him a letter saying it is sad that as people of knowledge we have allowed the media to keep us from meeting with each other to discuss any points of variance and from that day to this we have met quietly with certain members of the Jewish faith in New York, in my home in Chicago, in Los Angeles but never, never have we had the privilege of coming to a synagogue.
I met in my home with the Rabbi Knox, and Rabbi Sherman and when they came to my home and we had dinner together, Rabbi Sherman asked me if I would be willing to speak before the Boards of Rabbis, I said tomorrow if you could arrange it. And Rabbi Knox asked me if I would come to the synagogue I said tonight if you could arrange it.
We invited the Rabbis to the dedication of our new headquarters in Chicago in 1988 and they wrote me a letter saying unfortunately they could not come because they thought it would send the wrong signal.
So Jamaica, the land of my father, has afforded me an opportunity that has eluded me in the United States for nearly 18 years. This is an old desire from ever since the controversy began, it was my desire and our desire to resolve this conflict.
SERIOUS ISSUE
I remember I was invited to ABC to meet with the Jewish leaders, I said no I would not come on TV and argue with Jewish leaders for television is for entertainment which to me is too serious.
Let it go behind closed doors and find out our difficulty then come before television and say to the world that we have ironed out our difficulty and from this day forward we will work together for the common good. Unfortunately that did not happen, here we are in beloved Jamaica.
I have come to my father's home. My mother told me that my father was a man named Percival Clarke, a man that I never really knew but that his father was a teacher and that lineage came from Portugal. I thought to myself if the lineage of my father was from Portugal then my father's ancestors were among those Jews who found a home in the Caribbean and even though they owned slaves they were kind to those slaves and had relations with the women of those slaves and produced children from those slaves and I believe I am one of those descendants who have in my genetic coding the coding of a Jewish people.
At five years of age my mother gave me the violin I had a natural passion for this instrument. It must be a part of my Jewish heritage for as I came up all of my heroes in the violin were Russian Jews. And so I never, ever have a problem with the Jewish people. As a young boy growing up in Boston, Massachusetts I went to the oldest public school in North America called Boston Public Latin School established in 1635, one year before Harvard University was established. It was a very racist situation and in my classroom there was a young Jewish boy who was usually attacked by some of the other whites of other European extractions.
I did not stay in that school for very long; I went to complete my high school education at Boston English High School and seated behind me in my early years was a young Jewish boy, one of the most handsome young men that I have had the privilege of knowing. But it was 1948 and he told me he was going to Israel to fight for the new state. I didn't understand why this young man would leave the United States and go to fight for the state of Israel, it was many, many years before I would come to understand the sacrifice that that young man made, now here we are in beloved Jamaica.
SOMETHING MISSING
Jamaica has given me an opportunity to come and sit with members of the Jewish tradition, children of Abraham, the elder children of Abraham, as a Muslim and one who grew up in an Anglican background, who loved Jesus and loved the church, I found something missing and so I started looking for that which speaks against the oppression of black people and I ran into some of my friends who had converted to Islam and they brought me to a convention where I heard Elijah Mohammed and later heard Malcolm X and even though I was not necessarily desirous of leaving Christianity or embarking on a new religious course, I wanted to see black people free and my church was not addressing that concern, so I became a follower of the honourable Elijah Mohammed. Now I will quickly say to you what I believe and then answer the three questions, my dear brother that you raised.
First, we believe that we are following in the footsteps of the Jewish tradition, because as you according to scripture suffered 400 years in Egypt until the intervention of Jehovah until he raised up for you Musah or Moses to lead you out of that land into the wilderness and then into a land promised to you through Abraham, we believe that when our fathers were brought out of Africa into the slave trade and brought on a westerly journey to the Caribbean, to central and south American and then to America where the worst form of slavery was practised on black people, a people deprived of our names, our language, our culture, our religion and our history and made cattle slaves for 310 years where we were sold and bought as you buy merchandise, dehumanise not allowed to read the Bible or to learn how to read, and many whites that tried to teach us how to read were persecuted for bringing some degree of enlightenment to the slaves.
We believe as the scripture teaches before that great and dreadful day of the Lord I will send you Elijah, and Elijah the prophet will turn the hearts of the children to their father and the fathers heart back to the children, lest we come, or I come God said and strike the earth with a curse, we believe that that Elijah was raised from among us, a man like unto Moses who came to us in the stench of slavery and cleaned us up, reformed us and transformed our lives and made us whole and wholesome, inside America, we were persecuted, we were sent to prison for our faith, we were killed for our faith, but we stayed truth to that cause and in 1975 when Elijah Mohammed departed from among us, his son Emanuarthedean became the leader of the nation of Islam and took the nation of Islam into what is called the orthodox world of Islam, but I felt as a son of Elijah, that our people needed the people of Elijah that would transform their lives, not out of hatred for Emanuarthedean but out of the love for Elijah Mohammed, and a love for our people who still suffer to this day in North America, I decided to rebuild the work of the Honourable Elijah Mohammed, unfortunately, I came to the side of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, as he wanted to become the nominee of the Democratic Party for the Presidency for the United States of America, and during that time some of the Jewish people felt that Jesse Jackson and his quest for the presidency would upset the balance in black people who leaned more towards the Israelis than towards the Palestinians and so feeling that Jesse Jackson who had embraced Yasser Arafat and had made the statement that Judaism is a rose and Zionism is a weed that is choking the rose, Jesse Jackson then was looked upon as an anti-Semite, and so when I came by his side and I saw the media creating an atmosphere into which Jesse Jackson might have been assassinated, I spoke to Jewish leaders from my heart asking them to be careful how they handled Rev. Jackson because 90 per cent of the black people in American were with him and this would not go well for black Jewish relationships.
The following Sunday I was called in New York city by a certain Rabbi, a new black Hitler. Those words stung me for never in my life have I ever wanted to see done to Jewish what Hitler did to the Jews in Europe, that has never been in my heart, not then, not now, I am called and anti-Semite, I am called a hater, but if you look at those who follow me, you do not have one record of one of my followers doing one thing against a member of the Jewish faith, a member of the white community, or the black community, so if I am such a hater, why don't my followers demonstrated that hate, we have never picketed one Jewish establishment, because we have always related well to the Jewish people.
ATTACKED
So in answer to your question, when some of the Jewish leaders attacked me some of my followers went to the library to study from Jewish scholars their own writing on the slave trade, and it was not we who said this, it was Jewish scholars that didn't say that the Jews were the architect of the slave trade.
They said that 75 per cent of the Jews in the south had slaves, and when many of the Jews came out of Europe to the Caribbean to the West Indies, some of them became slave masters, slave owners, and then intermixed their blood into our women, thus we came forth lighter in complexion and looking different from the way we looked in Africa, well, did you say that it was only Jews, no, I said Arabs, Jews, Africans, Europeans were a part of the degradation of those of us who were brought out of Africa and those who were a part of our degradation should be a part of our resurrection, and so here we are in Jamaica.
I enjoyed the service this morning, I enjoyed the canter, I enjoyed the prayers, I enjoyed the ceremony, there was nothing that I heard with which I could disagree or would disagree, I felt grately honoured to be in this place, in your midst to worship with you. My hope is that we would send a signal to the world from blessed Jamaica that the Jews in America, many of them I hope will be inspired by what you took the courage to do.
It took courage to bring me here, it took courage to open your hearts to receive me and I pray that they will be no backlash to what you have done. In fact, we discussed it this morning and we felt that the leadership of Jamaica should applaud openly what you have done, so that when the word goes forth to the United States and to Europe and to wherever Jews may be on this earth, that they will say they took a bold step, now let's take one in the United States as well, because if we can mend and heal the wounds between our two communities, I can say that there is a possibility that we will be able to heal the wounds in Palestine and in Israel today. It is my hope and my prayer that yes, from this place, from this holy place, a new beginning can emerge.
In closing, my hope is that we who desire to raise our people up from the condition that slavery has put them in, which the blacks of Jamaica still suffer, with all our Christianity, all our Islam, all our Judaism, all of our religion, the masses of our people still suffer from the stench of our slave and colonial past and we need to be healed of that and who can heal us better than those whom God healed through the mouth of his prophet, so I think we have to forge an alliance for progress, an alliance building bridges of divine understanding that will raise the people of Jamaica to new heights and I pray that what was done here today that it will resonate all over the earth, and that Jews in the United States will give me a chance to come to the synagogue and worship and speak so that I may let you know from my heart that I harbour no evil, or no ill will towards the Jewish community, I offer you my hand in brotherhood, I offer you my hand for progress, I offer you my hand for the resurrection of humanity and I want to encourage you and challenge you to take the words, the sacred words of the Torah and make them live in Jamaica.
Let us not let our religion degenerate into mere ritual, like we do in Islam, like others do in Christianity, like I participated in today, beautiful rituals, but in those rituals is dynamic truth to reform and transform, not only human beings in the synagogue but to transform human life all over this planet, and I believe that is why God has allowed you to suffer and allowed us to suffer, so that through our suffering we could be purified and in that purification, God may come again to us and give us the great redemptive duty of redeeming the whole of humanity and bringing them back to the worship, the pure worship of the oneness of God.
Thank you so much for the honour and the privilege of being with you and allowing me the privilege of sharing words from my heart to you.
