Louis Farrakhan

Louis Farrakhan in February 2016

Louis Farrakhan (* 11. May 1933 in New York City as Louis Eugene Walcott ) is American leader of the African-American religious and political movement Nation of Islam .

Life

Farrakhan was born Louis Eugene Walcott in the Bronx , New York , and grew up in the West Indian community (Roxbury section) in Boston , Massachusetts . His mother, Sarah Mae Manning, immigrated from St. Kitts and Nevis in the 1920s ; his father, Percival Clarke, was a Jamaican taxi driver from New York. In Boston he attended the Boston Latin School and the English High School (the latter he graduated from). He then attended Winston-Salem Teachers College in North Carolina. He first appeared as a calypso singer under the name The Charmer . In 1955, under the influence of Malcolm X, he joined the Nation of Islam and replaced his surname Walcott with an X - a common practice of the Nation of Islam. The "X" stands for the unknown African name that was lost in the course of slavery. He was later given the name Abdul Haleem Farrakhan from Elijah Muhammad , the head of the movement at the time .

Farrakhan was initially a preacher at Temple No. 11 in Boston and from 1965 to 1972 successor to Malcolm X at Temple No. 7 in New York . After the death of Elijah Muhammad, his son Wallace Muhammad took over the leadership of the movement. Louis Farrakhan became the “special envoy” of the World Community Al-Islam in the West (WCIW), as the Nation of Islam is now called. In 1977 Farrakhan left the WCIW and in 1981 proclaimed the Second Resurrection of the Nation of Islam based on the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. Louis Farrakhan is addressed by the members of the Nation of Islam as The Honorable and is considered the National Representative of Elijah Muhammad .

In 1984 he supported civil rights activist Jesse Jackson in his unsuccessful attempt to become US President, and in 2008 he repeatedly praised Barack Obama , who, however, clearly distanced himself from Farrakhan. Because of the military operation in Libya , however, he turned away from Obama. At the beginning of May 2019, Farrakhan's website was permanently blocked by Facebook .

Farrakhan is married with nine children.

Ideology and criticism

Farrakhan propagated his racist and anti-Semitic ideology in numerous interviews and speeches . Farrakhan strongly advocated racial segregation : blacks and whites should live together peacefully in the US, albeit separately from one another. He blames “ Jewish bloodsuckers ” for the centuries of oppression of the allegedly “superior black minority ”. Because of this, he was compared to Adolf Hitler in 1984 by a representative of the Jewish organization B'nai B'rith . But he rejected this comparison. In 2012, he claimed that Jews "control the media," asked if the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC's proximity to the Federal Reserve Bank building was a coincidence; According to the Koran , Jews are the most violent people on earth. The Simon Wiesenthal Center then put him on its list of the ten most prominent anti-Semites and Israel-haters in the world. In 2018 he was voted second place in the worst anti-Semitic incidents of the year by the Simon Wiesenthal Institute because of his attacks against Jews that year .

In 1986 he was banned from entering Great Britain as a persona non grata , despite various attempts to challenge this ban. Farrakhan was the initiator, organizer and speaker at the 1995 Million-Man March in Washington. In 1996 he was awarded the International Gaddafi Prize for Human Rights . Farrakhan repeatedly praised the Libyan dictator Gaddafi as a role model for Africa and the Third World until his fall in 2011 , as did Zimbabwe's dictator Robert Mugabe .

Since 2010 Farrakhan has been recommending members of the Nation of Islam to study Scientology ( Dianetics ). Today it has 1,055 trained auditors.

literature

• Mattias Gardell: In the Name of Elijah Mohammed - Louis Farrakhan and The Nation of Islam . Duke University Press, 1996
• Kerstin Probiesch: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam . Africana Marburgensia , special issue 18, Marburg 2000

Web links

• Hans Hielscher: "Nation of Islam" leader Louis Farrakhan: The hour of the hate preacher . one day on Spiegel Online , May 11, 2018

Single receipts

1. ↑ Welt.de: Facebook blocks accounts of ultra-right commentators
2. ↑ 2012 Top Ten Anti-Semitic / Anti-Israel Slurs. (PDF, 886 kB) (No longer available online.) Simon Wiesenthal Center , December 31, 2012, pp. 4–5 , archived from the original on March 19, 2013 ; accessed on May 13, 2018 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ Juliane Wetzel: Farrakhan, Louis (Haleem Abdul) [born as Louis Eugene Walcott] . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus . Vol. 2: People . De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-44159-2 , p. 221 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
4. ↑ Minister Farrakhan rebuts fraudulent "Judaism is a gutter religion" canard. Nation of Islam, December 22, 1997, accessed May 13, 2018 . Adrienne Woltersdorf: Portrait: The old separatist of black Islam. In: the daily newspaper . February 27, 2007, accessed May 13, 2018 . 
    
5. ↑ Benjamin Weinthal: Wiesenthal ranks top 10 anti-Semites, Israel-haters. In: Jerusalem Post . December 28, 2012, accessed May 13, 2018 . 
6. ↑ Simon Wiesenthal Center (Ed.): 2018 Top Ten Worst Global Anti-Semitic Incidents . 2018, p. 2 ( wiesenthal.com [PDF]). 2018 Top Ten Worst Global Anti-Semitic Incidents ( Memento of the original from December 28, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
7. ↑ Ashahed M. Muhammad: Nation of Islam Auditors graduation held for third Saviors' Day in a row. In: The Final Call. February 28, 2013, accessed May 3, 2018 .