The Final Call

An Exclusive interview with the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan

By The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan | Last updated: Jan 12, 2016 - 10:53:40 AM

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[In an exclusive interview, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan spoke with Final Call editor-in-chief Richard B. Muhammad about events that occurred in 2015, their implications for 2016 and offered words of guidance on how to navigate these perilous times. Among his subjects were the Obama administration, growing unrest around the globe, the Justice Or Else! March and movement, God’s judgement against America, and the 2016 presidential election and candidates, and the upcoming Saviours’ Day 2016 in Detroit. The interview took place Jan. 6 at the home of the Nation of Islam’s patriarch, the Hon. Elijah Muhammad, in Phoenix. Below is an edited version of the interview.]

Final Call Newspaper editor Richard B. Muhammad (FCN):   As-Salaam Alaikum.

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan (MLF):  Wa-Alaikum Salaam, Brother Editor. 

FCN:  Brother Minister, as editor of the Final Call newspaper, I really would like to thank you on behalf of myself, The Final Call and our staff for this great opportunity at the home of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in Phoenix to speak with you. I wanted to get your views, your analysis, your guidance, as we look back to 2015 and ahead in 2016. I wanted to know as we begin, are there any things that immediately kind of come to your mind or would you like to kind of delve into questions?

MLF: You may delve into questions. I’m sure your questions will cause us to look back at 2015 and look forward to 2016. And let me, first, thank you and the staff of The Final Call for the wonderful work that you and they do to put out a paper each and every week. And I pray that we will be a stronger support of this great instrument of communication this year better than any other year in the past. We owe it to The Final Call.

FCN:  Brother Minister, thank you so much. And I would like to pledge to you that we will continue to work hard to provide our Nation, our People, and the Brothers who take this paper to our people with the best product that we can. We’re committed to that and we will continue to try to get just a little bit better every week.

MLF:  Thank you, sir.

FCN:  Thank you. The activism of young people in the Black Lives Matter movement, the failure to indict anyone in the deaths of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Sandra Bland in Texas,  and others in 2015.  We’ve seen the harsh weather conditions striking the country, war still wages abroad and America is concerned about what they call a threat of ISIS. How would you assess the year 2015 and what are the implications for 2016?

MLF:  I will start first with our teacher, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. As the readers of Muhammad Speaks and The Final Call can attest for over 40 years the Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us of what would happen to bring about the end of this present world and its civilization. He told us of the Judgment of God. He told us that America would have to reap the consequences of what she has sown. Mainly the anger of God is directed at America for the 310 years of slavery of the Black man and woman and the destruction of the Indigenous People of this hemisphere—over 120 million deaths of Native people since the Caucasians entered this hemisphere. Not to think of the hundreds of thousands to the millions of Blacks who died in the Middle Passage and who ended up in the Caribbean, in Central and South America and in North America.

So this last year was the worst year in the history of America for the weather. Now, they can blame it on El Nino, but El Nino is a force that is under the control of Him who can create the weather that was prophesied to come. Snow out of the North, unusual rain, unusual snow, wind, sleet, hail, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes—all of this battering America. Fire on the West Coast, water, mudslides and the worst is yet to come all because the Lord of Creation has said to us through the Hon. Elijah Muhammad, you cannot defeat your enemies physically. They have all of the weapons but God said the battle is not yours, the battle is mine. Vengeance is mine saith the Lord.

So His wrath has entered America now and it’s getting more and more vicious; more and more deadly, more and more costly. So 2015 was the worst on record and 2016 has started off very harsh. And in our recent interview with Mr. Alex Jones of InforWars.com, at the end of that interview I said, “Watch the weather; it will be worse this year than last year.”

Why is this? You mentioned the wonderful young people that have been slaughtered in police misconduct. The Hon. Elijah Muhammad 50 years ago told us that this persecution would get worse and worse and the plight of our people and our cry for justice would fall on deaf ears and this would force our people to think of that which God wants and that is to separate us from our enemies and to plant us in a land of our own. Because He has purposed to make a great nation out of us as the cornerstone of the Kingdom of God.

This is what we are facing in 2016: Worse weather, worse treatment; worse weather, more killing; worse weather, more injustice. This is a whipping that will force us to bow down to the Will of God.

FCN: We had the incredible Justice Or Else! gathering on the 20th Anniversary of the Million Man March, and a very successful holiday spending boycott as part of the Redistribute the Pain campaign in 2015. 

How should we view what happened in Washington, D.C., with very little to no help from the traditional Civil Rights leadership, groups or politicians? What should we be doing now and should we be studying that day and how it actually unfolded?

MLF:  As you know, Brother Richard, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in 1963 after the first great March on Washington, which featured the great speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mr. Muhammad said to me, “One day I’m going to call a March and it will be for Justice.”  He said, “And when we go to Washington, we will not leave until we get what we came there for.” 

So 10.10.15 was the beginning of a long road to Justice and it started with our call Justice Or Else!. This frightened a lot of people. They didn’t know what we meant by Or Else! but the Or Else! is really God, Number One and His Wrath. It’s written in the Book of Revelation, “The nations are angry and thy wrath is come. It is the time of the dead that they should be given justice.” All the nations of the earth are now angry.

This morning I woke up to the news that Kim Juong Un of North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb. The nations are upset with him, so the nations are angry. Angry not only with him, but angry inside their houses with the awakening of the masses and the cry of the people for Justice and real change. So revolution is brewing everywhere. I woke up to the news this morning of the split between Shia and Sunni Muslims. Saudi Arabia on one side, Iran on the other and many Arab Muslim nations have pulled their ambassadors away from Iran and now it is like a state of war exists between Muslims. 

And I think in The Time and What Must Be Done, No. 34, I mentioned War in the Middle East. I mentioned that area will be drenched in blood, and the blood that will be shed in that area of the world is for the purification of that part of the world for the Real Children of Israel, the People of God, to come back and occupy that part of the world. It belongs to the Original People of the earth, and it is written that the Messiah would lead the Children of Israel to the Promised Land.

So there’s much going on and much to expect and we have to gird up our loins and come closer in unity with God, with the truth and with each other; and we have to be busy now doing that which will prepare us for the long road to justice and the land of our own.

FCN: Brother Minister, the Obama presidency is coming to a close. We have a presidential election, national election that looms this fall. Is it too early to start to assess the president’s tenure over the United States at this point? Do you have any thoughts or any assessments, analysis in terms of how he did, or is it too late? Or do we need to see more about what the results will be?

MLF: It is always good to withhold judgment until his tenure of office is over. And then it takes time and a dispassionate view to give President Obama his place in history. I wouldn’t want to be Pharaoh at the time of the Fall of Egypt. As I said, he was selected before he was elected. Those forces vetted him, they knew of his goodness. They knew of his brilliance. They wanted him to be president for their purpose but their main purpose was to deceive Black America to make us think that we have a future under the social, political, economic valance of Western civilization.

At his inauguration, it was a great event. I’ve never seen Black people so happy. And I have to confess I was one of those Black people that was happy. My wife and I went out early in the morning, 5 a.m., to vote for our brother. I had hope in him as we did. As I listened to his campaign speeches, I said he reminded me of the Messiah. Not that he is the Messiah because the Messiah will not come from the political world. He’ll come out of the spiritual world but Mr. Obama was so magnetic. 

He drew to him every aspect of American life. He had Black, Brown, Red, Yellow, White, Jews, Gentiles, Buddhists, Sikhs. He had it all, gay and straight. He had it all and he was the first president to my knowledge that garnered enough money for the campaign from the small donations of millions of people that gave him over a billion dollars where he did not need the money of that One Percent. But they gave money too, and of course when he took his oath of office, he took it at a time when America economically was collapsing. 

And Barack surrounded himself with some of those bankers from Wall Street, Larry Summers and others who had wrecked the economy under President G.W. Bush were now with our brother. He was an intelligent man who could reason but he needed the skill of others to help him do his job. All the wonderful things he said while campaigning: Look how he went to Egypt and Germany and Europe, he had thousands and thousands of people who were withering under the Bush Administration and losing confidence in America. With his brilliance, he ignited the hope of Africa, the hope of the Middle East, the hope of Europe, the hope of the Caribbean, Central and South America. He ignited the hope of the entire world that he would produce a change that they and we could believe in.

But I don’t think our brother really understood the Shadow Government that manipulates the elected government, and so he was given the Nobel Peace Prize and then immediately, unfortunately, he continued the neo-conservative agenda that was initiated under Mr. Bush. He’s done some good. I could never be more thankful to his ascendency to the presidency because I knew that little Black and Brown children, little Native American children would see him and listen to him and know that they wouldn’t have to bounce a basketball or throw a football or run track or play tennis to escape the bondage of the inner cities. They could be whatever they wanted to be because President Barack Obama showed them that we could rule not only America, but because of our sojourn and our suffering, we could be world leaders.

For that, I’m eternally grateful but after winning the Peace Prize it has been nothing but more war. Mr. Bush got us into Iraq and Afghanistan but with their lies and deceit, they didn’t expect in what they called the “Arab Spring” for Egypt to be engulfed. When Hosni Mubarak’s government collapsed, that didn’t go according to the plan of the neo-cons. Egypt was not in their sights for regime change. It was Iraq. It was Syria. It was Lebanon. It was Sudan. It was Somalia. It was Libya. It was Iran, according to Wesley Clarke. (General Clark, a retired four-star general, was Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the Kosovo War.)  Seven regimes were to go down in five years. It was not to be Egypt but the youth in Egypt wanted a change, they rose. And Mubarak fell. 

Then they had a democratic election and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood became the elected president of Egypt. In the capitals of the West, they couldn’t abide by the fact that members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist, became president, elected by the people. Before he could take office, the judges and rulers clipped his wings and his power. But when he got in he restored the power of the presidency legally. Then the West decided they couldn’t abide it so a coup took him and took him out of power.

American law said the U.S. could not support a regime that came to power under a coup. So naturally they finagled around and of course Egypt was still getting what America promised. Now it’s a police state. It’s a state of great unrest now. These are things that have been done on the watch of Barack Obama and I will close that question with this:  The Shadow Government is more powerful than the real government. John Fitzgerald Kennedy spoke about it. Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke about it and here we are now facing another election. 

People are talking about what they want to do but they’re all in need of money. The only one that doesn’t need any money is Donald Trump. And Mr. Trump went before the members of the Jewish community, and to my knowledge, he’s the first presidential candidate in recent history that has ever said to the Jewish community, “I don’t need your money.” And I think he said, “I don’t want your money.” That means for the first time he’ll be free enough, if he’s wise enough, to adopt a way to save America from the Wrath of God.

Here’s what I see: In this election so far, none of these candidates have spoken of the plight of Black people and the indigenous people of America and this hemisphere. It’s like we don’t exist, but I’m going to put this out and I want it amplified: The Wrath of God that has entered America not just because of what America has done to others, which is much. It’s what America has done to Black people and to the Native People and God has chosen Us out of the furnace of affliction to be His people and if we are not considered, none of them can save America from the Wrath of God. But if there’s one among them brave enough to hear God’s Will, now I’m talking to the religious scholars. If we put before you the reason for the wrath of God, none of you can deny God’s wrath is here now and it will get worse.

If you want it to subside or to end, or to give America an extension of time, God wants us to be separated in a state or territory of our own. God wants America to agree to look out for us in that state or territory for the next 20-25 years to fulfill what Thomas Jefferson wanted that we go away with implements, things that would allow us to make an independent start. That we might leave America politically, spiritually as friends with a good relationship with America but we are forming a nation of our own.

Now if any of these candidates would even consider separation, God would show them you’re on the right course to save America from his wrath. But until you think about us and put justice for us in the equation, your suffering will intensify on a greater level in 2016 and 2017 and may bring the end of you, America, as a power completely in the world.

FCN: Brother Minister, I wanted to thank you. We are actually nearly at the end of the time we had allotted. We thank you so much for your time and your incredible answers and direction and for the honor of dialoging with you that we may share such light with our people and with the world.

MLF: I appreciate that and I think that in the last minute or two that is left, we have to stop trying to force ourselves on White people. We have to make our own community a decent place to live and make it safe and habitable for our people. The thrust of the Movement is to free where we live from senseless violence and to free this community from police. They don’t need more training. They’re well trained. Their training shows in other communities, it’s only when they come into our community that another kind of training comes into force.

They are an Occupying Army to colonized people. When we make our own community a decent place to live, we don’t want them in our community at all. We want to police our own community. In Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood, I don’t see us on the University of Chicago and university hospital police force. That is a police force that polices its own community. We can do the same. We have professional people who have gone to police training. We need to pull up some of our young people and train them and ask the Whites to leave.

You go and patrol your community. We will police our own. We can begin taking our community and making it ours and making those who come in to respect our territory, like we have to respect theirs, but that will never happen until we respect ourselves. 

I thank The Final Call for asking me such questions and eliciting from me these answers. I never knew what you were going to ask and I never knew what I was going to say. But if you analyze it, you’ll be able to see that somebody else is guiding the Minister.

FCN: One last question—Saviours’ Day 2016 in Detroit, can you share with us in any way what that should look like? What should our mindset be? How should we be preparing right now for February in Detroit?

MLF: There are a lot of people that have listened to me for generations and some of them have been bold enough to say ‘we’re tired of speeches, Farrakhan. I don’t want to hear one more speech.’ As I heard such criticism and thoughts, I said, “You know everything that needs to be said, I have really said it. It’s now not things to say, it is things to do. The subject in Detroit is “Divine Instruction and Commands” from the Commander in Chief of Black People and that’s God Himself who appeared in the person of Master Fard Muhammad and His Messiah, Elijah Muhammad. 

Commands not from a superior to an inferior but from the wisdom of God to direct us to take our communities and make them safe, clean and decent. We can’t make a better world or a better people under the present educational system of White America. We reject it entirely. We have scholars and scientists among us who are well educated. We must develop a curriculum for the inner cities that the Black and the Brown, and even the poor Whites and Native People, can have an education that will civilize us and prepare us for self-governance. We can make a better people.  

Where’s your proof, Farrakhan? Look at the Nation of Islam. Look at what we do in the University of Islam. No, we are not perfect but we are better than what we see being produced by this Western education. We need a better education then we can make a better people.  Much more for Saviours’ Day.

I would advise those who are ready to work, those who are ready for the real work of cleaning up our community and making it decent and safe and productive, meet me in Detroit. Bring your scholarship and your desires for this very well may be my last Saviours’ Day among you but I have run the course and I’m just about finished the course. I have kept the faith and Inshallah, I may go away not to die but to get the New Wisdom.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad told me that “what I’ve given you is just a wake up message” and you are so slow in waking up and you wake up and you’re groggy and the enemy put a little pacifier in your mouth and you go back to sleep again but it’s time now for a greater knowledge to come.

I can’t make that up. I have to go get it from him who taught us all in the first place. Yes, he’s alive and those of you who think he’s dead if I go and you see me again, you’ll know that I have been where all you would like to be. May Allah bless you all and let us have a great Saviours’ Day.

FCN: Brother Minister, again thank you so much. As-Salaam Alaikum.

MLF:  Wa-alaikum Salaam.