Farrakhan’s True Colors

Sunday’s Los Angeles Times ” title=”reported”>reported on the vision he had after having been on that “space wheel” to meet with the late Elijah Muhammed. That meeting imbued him with divine knowledge—-including prophesying the recent earthquake in Chile, (“It’s not an accident that a great earthquake took place in Chile…it was a precipitate of what I have to tell you today of what’s coming to America. You will not escape”). The wheel, he noted, had technology “1 million years ahead” of America’s. He also asserted that the spaceship contains 1,500 airplanes, each equipped with three bombs and the “angels on that human-built planet can build a wall out of air … wall America in and start a fire.”

His immodesty was on display as well; it was “too cheap” to call him just a prophet—- he said. “I’m very humble…..I’m a light in the midst of darkness.”

There have been reports for years that Farrakhan is sick and his activity level diminished. Maybe that explains his willingness to make more of his delusionary musings public. The sorry fact is that no matter how nutty Farrakhan’s rants, he managed to fill up an arena with 20,000 adoring fans and he is still national news (nearly 40,000 Google results).

While he hasn’t often trumpeted his more off-beat theories on religion and “space wheels” when he entertains the media, he has betrayed them often enough so that thinking reporters should have written him off years ago as delusional. Instead of being ignored, he continues to be treated as an off-beat leader who promotes his anti-Semitic and racist views as if he were sane.  Years ago, an editor at the Times told me that the Jewish community had to put up with his anti-Semitism, “because his message of self-empowerment is so important.”

The archetypal example of this strange phenomenon of giving the minister’s theology a pass while according his political views a hearing was an interview of Farrakhan conducted by Ted Koppel on