Farrakhan Praises Ferguson Violence and ‘Law of Retaliation’; Networks Fail to Cover
During a speech in Baltimore on Saturday, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan justified the violence that took place in Ferguson, Missouri in the aftermath of the grand jury decision and called on African-Americans to “die for something” and “tear this goddamn country up” as peaceful protests only benefit “white folks.”
Since Farrakhan’s remarks at Morgan State University became public, the major broadcast networks have all ignored the story completely in both their respective morning and evening newscasts.
Farrakhan spoke of how he believes that both the Koran and the Bible allow for a violent “law of retaliation” against white people who have been killing African-Americans and that a clear message must be sent:
See, now when my Muslim family here, Imams and my Christian family – in this book, there’s a law for retaliation. A law for retaliation, like for like. The Bible says an eye, a tooth, a life. See now, as long as they kill us, and go to Wendy’s and have a burger and go to sleep, they gonna keep killing us, but when we die and they die, then soon we gonna sit down at a table and talk about – we tired. We want some of this earth and we’ll tear this Goddamn country up.
He also encouraged audience members to “teach your baby how to throw the bottle if they can” in reference to a Molotov cocktail as “[w]e are going to die anyway.”
On Monday night, ABC, CBS, and NBC each offered at least one segment of coverage on the protests nationwide since the decision by the grand jury in Ferguson to not indict then-Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in relation to the death of Michael Brown was announced on November 24.
All told, ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir devoted one segment to the story, while the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley and NBC Nightly News each devoted two reports to the matter. Despite all the resources and air time, they found no time to mention these radical remarks about Ferguson that calls for further violence.
In an example of what the networks covered instead, ABC briefly covered the viral video of a dog sleeping in a car until the song “Let It Go” from Disney’s Frozen began playing and the dog howled.
— Curtis Houck is News Analyst at the Media Research Center. Follow Curtis Houck on Twitter.
