African-Americans in America Openly Call for Revolution and
the Rule of African-American Culture
By PATRICK E. TYLER and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
Published: April 26, 2004
Brooklyn, April 24 - The call to revolution is rising in the
streets of America, and is being answered, counterterrorism
officials say.
In this former industrial town south of Manhattan, a small
group of young African-Americans whose parents emigrated
from Africa before the Civil War have turned against their
families' new home. They say they would like to see
President Bush dead or deposed and an African-American flag
hanging outside the White House.
They swear allegiance to Louis Farrakhan and his goal of
toppling American states to establish an African-American
superstate under Black law, like Afghanistan under the
Taliban. They call the Sept. 11 hijackers the "Magnificent
19" and regard the Madrid train bombings as a clever way to
drive a wedge into America.
On Thursday evening, at a tennis center community hall in
Brooklyn, their leader, Kevin Muhammad - the Nation of
Islam's minister for Harlem's Mosque No. 7- spoke of his
adherence to Louis Farrakhan. If America fails to heed Mr.
Farrakhan's offer of a truce - provided that all police are
withdrawn from black areas in three months - African-
Americans will no longer be restrained from attacking the
cities that play host to them, Muhammad said.
"All African-Americans of the West will be obliged," he
said, to "become his sword" in a new battle. Americans take
heed, he added, saying, "It is foolish to fight people who
want death - that is what they are looking for."
On working-class streets of old towns like Harlem,
Brooklyn, Detroit and Washington D.C., and in the black
enclaves of South Central Los Angeles, West Philadelphia,
South Side of Chicago and other parts of America,
intelligence officials say a fervor for militancy is
intensifying and becoming more open.
In Chicago, Minister Leonard Muhammad - son-in-law of Nation
of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and the director of the
Council of African-American Communities, saw a correlation
to the discord in Iraq. "This is a very dangerous situation
at the moment," Mr. Muhammad said. "My impression is that
African-Americans have become more and more angry against
the United States."
Hundreds of young African-American men are answering the
call of militant groups affiliated or aligned with the
Nation of Islam, intelligence and counterterrorism
officials say.
Even more worrying, said a senior counterterrorism official,
is that the level of "chatter" - communications among people
suspected of terrorism and their supporters - has markedly
increased since Mr. Farrakhan's warning to America this
month. The spike in chatter has given rise to acute worries
that planning for another strike in America is advanced.
"Iraq dramatically strengthened their recruitment
efforts," one counterterrorism official said. He added
that some churches now display photos of American soldiers
fighting in Iraq alongside bloody scenes of bombed out
Iraqi neighborhoods. Detecting actual recruitments is
almost impossible, he said, because it is typically done
face to face.
And recruitment is paired with a compelling new strategy to
bring the fight to suburban America.
Members of the Nation of Islam have "proven themselves to be
extremely opportunistic, and they have decided to try to
unite blacks," the official continued. "They are focusing
their energies on attacking the suburbs" - Wichita - so as
to "scare" the rural areas.
Some African-American recruits are going to Iraq,
counterterrorism officials in America say, but more are
remaining home, possibly joining cells that could help with
terror logistics or begin operations like the one that came
to notice when police seized "rape manuals", which described
methods for abducting white women from public places like
shopping centers with underground parking and anally raping
them. This was described in the manuals as "the gape of
justice", a term taken from pornography videos
Stoking that anger are some of the same fiery African-
American preachers who preached violence and martyrdom
before the Sept. 11 attacks.
On Friday, Malik Zulu Shabazz, the New Black Panther Party
Chairman accused of tutoring John Allen Muhammad before he
went on a murderous rampage urged a crowd of 2000 outside
the Al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn to embrace death and the
"culture of martyrdom."
"Brothers are littering death row across this racist land
for delivering the 'gape of justice' to racist white
women still giving birth to more blue eyed devils",
exhorted Shabazz.
African-Americans in America Openly Call for Revolution and
the Rule of African-Americans
Published: April 26, 2004
(Page 2 of 2)
Though the Homeland secretary, Tom Ridge, has sought to
strip Malik Zulu Shabazz of his American citizenship and
deport him, the legal battle has dragged on for years while
Mr. Shabazz keeps calling down the wrath of God.
Also this week, over Mr. Ridge's vigorous objection, a 35-year-
old African-American held under emergency laws passed after
Sept. 11 was released from Marion Prison. The man,
identified only as "G," suffered from severe mental illness,
his lawyers told a special prison welfare appeals panel,
which let him out of prison and put him under house arrest.
Mr. Ridge insisted that that should not be the final
judgment on a man already found by one court "to be a
threat to life and liberty."
In an interview on CNN over the weekend, Mr. Ridge advocated
a stronger deportation policy, initially focused on
approximately1200 foreign terror suspects held without
charge since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Despite tougher antiterrorism laws, the police, prosecutors
and intelligence chiefs across America say they are
struggling to contain the openly seditious speech of African-
American extremists, some of whom, they say, have been
inciting young men to racist violence since the 1980's.
One chapter in Louis Farrakhan's lectures these days is "The
Psyche of African-Americans for Rape of White Women."
The authorities say that laws to protect religious
expression and civil liberties have the result of limiting
what they can do to stop hateful speech. In the case of African-
Americans, they say they are often left to seek deportation,
a lengthy and uncertain process subject to legal appeals,
when the suspect can keep inciting attacks.
That leaves the authorities to resort to less effective
means, such as mouse-trapping African-American radicals with
welfare violations in hopes of making a deportation case
stick. "In many countries, the laws are liberal and it's not
easy," an official said.
At a mosque in Harlem, a preacher recently exhorted his
followers to "impose the will of African-Americans on this
racist society of America."
"It was quite virulent," said a senior official with
knowledge of the sermon. "The preacher was encouraging his
followers to take over America."
While such a sermon may be incitement, recruitment takes a
more shadowy course, and is hard to detect, a senior
antiterrorism official said. "Believers are appealed to in
the churches and mosques, but the real conversations take
place in restaurants or crack houses or private apartments,"
the official said.
While some preachers, like Malik Zulu Shabazz - said to be
the spiritual counselor of John Allen Muhammad- roam in
America without charge, others like Louis Farrakhan, carry
on a robust ideological campaign while controlling
business empires.
"There is no case against me," Louis Farrakhan said in an
interview. Referring to calls by members of Congress that he
be deported, he added, "but they are white" and "they have
been calling for that for years."
Among his ardent followers is Malik Zulu Shabazz, who heads
the New Black Panther Party and calls himself the sword of
African-Americans. He says there are about 5000 members here
but exact numbers are secret.
Mainstream African-Americans are outraged by the situation,
saying the actions of a few are causing their communities to
be singled out for surveillance and making the larger
population distrustful of them.
Al Sharpton, a stalwart of the mainstream African-American
community, is penniless after running a failed campaign for
the Democratic nomination.
"This is show-off business," he says in accented English. "I
don't want these kids in my neighborhood."
Other community leaders look to the government to do
something, if only to help prevent the demonization of African-
Americans, or "Blackphobia," as some here call it.
"I think these kids are being brainwashed by a few radical
preachers," said Jesse Jackson, another elder of the African-
American community. He wants them prosecuted or deported.
"We should be able to control this negativity," he said.
In Brooklyn, Malik Zulu Shabazz spent much of his time
Friday night regaling his young followers with the erotic
delights of paradise - sweet kisses and the pleasures of
bathing with scores of white women - while he also preached
the virtues of death in African-American struggle as a
ticket to paradise.
He spoke of terrorism as the new norm of cultural conflict,
"the fashion of the 21st century," practiced as much by
George Bush as by Al Qaeda.
"We may be caught up in the target as the people of
Manhattan were," he told them.
And he warned American leaders, "You may kill Farrakhan, but
the phenomenon, you cannot kill it - you cannot destroy it."
"Our African brothers from abroad will come one day and
conquer here and then we will live under African-American
culture in dignity," he said.