From: "ANDERSON DAVID" <andersd at spot.colorado.edu> | Block Address
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Subject: [ASDnet] 2 Sidebars to Nazi/Islamist article..Black Muslims and Holcaust Denier
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2002 00:51:22 -0700 (MST)
Reply-to: asdnet at igc.topica.com
2 sidebars to Nazi/Islamist article...again, for some reason, the quotation marks disappeared.
Dave ------------------------------------------------- from Intelligence Report Spring 2002 (Southern Poverty Law Center)
By Martin Lee
Some American Black Muslims make common cause with
domestic neo-Nazis and foreign Muslim extremists
In 1961, Elijah Muhammad, founder of the black supremacist
Nation of Islam, met with
Ku Klux Klan leaders at the Magnolia Hall in Atlanta. Although they had different ideas
about the skin color of the master race, they shared the belief that blacks and whites
should stay separate. The following year, Muhammad invited
American Nazi Party chief
George Lincoln Rockwell to address a Nation convention in Chicago, even though
Rockwell had often called blacks the lowest scum of humanity. Flanked by a dozen
storm troopers in swastika armbands, Rockwell told an audience of 5,000 Nation
devotees that he was proud to stand here before black men. Elijah Muhammad is
the Adolf Hitler of the black man.
Sporadic contacts between Black Muslims and white supremacists continued after Louis
Farrakhan set up his own branch of the Nation of Islam in 1975. Klan leader Tom
Metzger was so impressed with Farrakhan's anti-Semitic bombast that he donated $100
to the Nation after a Farrakhan rally in Los Angeles in
September 1985. A month later,
Metzger and 200 other white supremacists from the United States and Canada gathered
on a farm about 50 miles west of Detroit, where they pledged
their support for the
Nation of Islam. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, explained
Art Jones, a
neo-Nazi militant from Chicago. I salute Louis Farrakhan and anyone else who stands
up against the Jews.
The Nation's contacts with non-black extremists has not been limited to domestic
neo-Nazis and Klansmen. During his international travels,
Farrakhan has been officially
welcomed in a number of countries, including several repressive Arab states. The Final
Call, Farrakhan's newspaper, describes one such globetrotting expedition in 1986, when
he visited Libya for discussions with Col. Muammar Ghaddafi, who had given Farrakhan
a $5 million interest-free loan the previous year. After Libya, Farrakhan ventured to
Jeddah, where he conferred with top Saudi Arabian officials
before paying a courtesy
call to Idi Amin, the exiled Ugandan despot. Farrakhan was also warmly received by
General Zia-ul-Huq, the military dictator of Pakistan, whose abysmal human rights
record coincided with efforts to impose a harsh Islamic fundamentalist regime in his
country.
An American Takes Up the Cause
During the 1980s, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan played a crucial
role in supporting the
U.S.-backed mujahedeen resistance forces that were fighting to expel the Soviets from
Afghanistan. Islamic volunteers from all over the world flocked to mujahedeen training
camps in Pakistan to help win this holy war against godless Communism. They were
joined by scores of combatants from the United States, including Clement Rodney
Hampton-El, an American Black Muslim unaffiliated with the Nation, who suffered arm
and leg wounds in Afghanistan.
After returning to Brooklyn, Hampton-El worked closely with a shadowy splinter group
called al-Fuqra, whose followers in the United States and Canada are predominantly
Black Muslims. Several other al-Fuqra initiates had also trained in Pakistan as part of
the effort to throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Founded in 1980 by a Pakistani
mystic named Shiek Mubarik Ali Jilani, al-Fuqra was organized
into independent terrorist
cells. An avowed enemy of the Nation of Islam, al-Fuqra has been linked by U.S.
officials to 17 homicides and 13 firebombings in the United
States. Its targets were
usually other minorities or rival Muslim leaders.
In 1995, Hampton-El was sentenced to 35 years in prison for his involvement in a failed
plot to bomb the United Nations and other New York City
landmarks. Nine other
Muslim extremists were convicted as co-conspirators in this case, including Sheik Omar
Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric, who is serving a life sentence for his role as
ringleader of the plot. The blind sheik has also been linked to the terrorists who bombed
the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000.
Hampton-El told an FBI informant that he had participated in a test explosion for the
first attack on the World Trade Center.
According to recent reports, the Justice Department is probing possible links between
al-Fuqra and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. American
officials have obtained a
videotape of a December 1993 meeting in Sudan, then a nerve center for the bin Laden
organization, where al-Fuqra leader Shiek Mubarik Ali Jilani met with members of
Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups. Representatives of al-Qaeda
are also believed to have been present at this meeting. Federal officials also believe that
al-Fuqra members collaborated with Wadih El-Hage, who was sentenced to life in
prison this year for conspiring with Osama bin Laden in the bombings of two American
embassies in Africa in 1998.
Martin A. Lee
Intelligence Report
Spring 2002
Issue 105
Between Friends
U.S. Holocaust deniers help unite neo-Nazis, Arab extremists
American extremists who claim that Jews fabricated the Holocaust to discredit Hitler
and to justify the dispossession of Palestinians have made common cause on the
propaganda front with jihadists from the Middle East. At the forefront of this
collaborative effort is the Institute for Historical Review
(IHR), the leading promoter of
Holocaust denial in the United States.
Founded in 1978, the Southern California-based IHR distributes books, pamphlets, audio
and videotapes that purport to prove the Holocaust never
happened. These assassins of
memory, as French literary historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet calls the Holo-hoaxers, also
publish the Journal of Historical Review, which tries mightily to impress its readers
with footnotes and other scholarly trappings. A recent issue spoke breathlessly of a
white-hot trend: the rapid growth of Holocaust revisionism,
fueled by increasing
cooperation between Muslims and Western revisionists, across the Islamic world.
Early last year, the IHR organized a conference on Zionism and Revisionism that was
set for Beirut that March. Billed as an opportunity for North American and European
extremists to meet their counterparts in the Islamic world, the event was delayed and
relocated due to complaints by Jewish groups and diplomatic pressure from the United
States and Europe. An open letter signed by 14 leading Arab intellectuals also
denounced the conference, which was eventually held in Amman, Jordan. The featured
speaker at this scaled-down meeting, hosted locally by the Jordanian Writers'
Federation, was French negationist Robert Faurisson, a longtime IHR advisor, who told
a sympathetic audience that Hitler never ordered or allowed the killing of anyone on
account of his or her race or religion and that the Germans suffered, in reality, a fate
far worse than that of the Jews.
Feeding the Propaganda Machine
Driven by the proliferation of neo-Nazi propaganda and
antagonism toward Israel,
Holocaust denial has gained widespread acceptance across the Arab world in recent
years. It's no coincidence that commentary on the IHR Web site is translated and
posted in Arabic, as well as in German and English. IHR director Mark Weber takes
pride in the fact that he and other revisionists, as they like to call themselves, have
been interviewed on Iranian state radio. Iran's Islamic fundamentalist regime has
granted refuge to several European Holocaust-deniers, who were convicted of hate
speech crimes in their home countries. Jrgen Graf, an IHR editorial advisor, fled to
Tehran rather than serve a 15-month sentence in a Swiss prison.
A key IHR ally among Muslim extremists is Ahmed Rami, a former Moroccan army
officer who fled his native country after joining a failed coup attempt against King
Hassan in 1972. Today Rami runs Radio Islam, a Stockholm-based neo-Nazi
propaganda outfit. In addition to articles such as USA's Rulers: They are all Jews, the
Web site of Radio Islam carries the full text of The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion,
one of the vilest forgeries in modern history.
For many Palestinians, denying the Holocaust is an effective way to reject any Jewish
claim to Israel. Columbia University professor Edward Said, a Palestinian American,
laments the proliferation of this tendency among Arabs. If we expect Israeli Jews not
to use the Holocaust to justify appalling human rights abuses of the Palestinian people,
Said says, we too have to go beyond such idiocies as saying that the Holocaust never
took place.
Holocaust denial has become increasingly common in leading newspapers in Egypt,
Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and other Arab countries, where official thinking is
reflected in tightly controlled national media. Support for denial enables corrupt Arab
governments to deflect attention from their own failures,
including their own exploitation
of Muslim populations and brutal repression of many peoples, including Kurds, Berbers,
Egyptian Copts and Maronite Lebanese.
Saudi Arabia at the Forefront
Of all the Arab nations involved in promoting anti-Semitic propaganda, Saudi Arabia is
perhaps the most egregious offender. In the late 1970s, for instance, the Saudi
government retained the services of American neo-Nazi William Grimstead as a
Washington lobbyist. During this period, the Saudi royal family lavished funds on
numerous Sunni fundamentalist organizations, including the Pakistan-based World
Muslim Congress (WMC), which was headed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, an
anti-Semitic Nazi collaborator, until his death in 1974.
A few years later, the WMC mailed Holocaust denial literature to every member of the
U.S. Congress and the British parliament. Issah Nakleh, a Palestinian writer affiliated
with the WMC, became a fixture at IHR conferences in the United States and a regular
contributor to the Journal of Historical Review. Nakleh was also well known to
readers of The Spotlight, the anti-Semitic weekly published by the IHR's now-defunct
parent organization, the Liberty Lobby. Acknowledging their political kinship, WMC
secretary-general Dr. Inamullah Khan, a trusted advisor to the Saudi royal family, sent a
letter to The Spotlight, praising its superb in-depth analysis and stating that the paper
deserved the thanks of all right-minded people.
Like many American and European neo-fascist groups, the WMC espoused a Third
Position ideology critical of both Cold War superpowers, as underscored by this
headline from Muslim World, the WMC's official mouthpiece: U.S. and USSR Both
Serve Zionist Interests. But the WMC tempered its anti-American tirades when the
Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Working closely with Saudi and U.S.
intelligence, the WMC supported the Afghan mujahedeen in their struggle against the
Soviet-backed rulers in Kabul. During this period, WMC chief Inamullah Khan also
served as head of the Pakistani section of the World Anti-Communist League, an
international umbrella organization that included fascist collaborators from Europe, Latin
American death squad bosses, and right-wing extremists from Asia and North America.
After the Soviets abandoned Afghanistan, the World Muslim
Congress and several other
Islamic extremist groups once again turned their fundamentalist wrath against the United
States.
Martin A. Lee
Intelligence Report
Spring 2002
Issue 105
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