Hiding Louis Farrakhan's Racist Rants
Monday's front-page story by the Times' Muslim-in-America beat reporter Neil MacFarquhar, "Nationof Islam At a Crossroad As Leader Exits," centers on what may have been the last major public address by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
Yet MacFarquhar, while going through the history of the Nation of Islam and Farrakhan's leadership, devotes a single vague one-sentence paragraph to Farrakhan's well-documented racist and anti-Semitic comments, the 30th paragraph of his long story: "But along with his reforms, Mr. Farrakhan gained notoriety and drew widespread criticism for speeches that were deemed racist against whites, particularly Jews."
The Anti-Defamation League has gathered Farrakhan's anti-white and anti-Jewish rantings.
MacFarquhar also spends little time on Farrakhan's um, unorthodox beliefs: "The Nation holds, among other teachings, that the group's founder, W. Fard Muhammad, was the Mahdi, or savior, sent by God to Detroit around 1930 and that spaceships hovering above the earth will eventually play a major role in smiting sinners and rescuing the righteous."
MacFarquhar has proven reluctant to criticize Muslim-Americans in the past, as shown by his whitewash of the incident involving six imams boarding a plane in Minneapolis last year.
