Richard Friedman's 'Creepy' Choice: A Jewish Hair for 1,000 Black Lives?

By Tingba Muhammad -Guest Columnist- | Last updated: Jul 5, 2013 - 12:26:17 PM

By any measure the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan’s presence in Alabama in support of voting rights justice for all Americans was a monumental victory for that important cause. Places like Birmingham, Montgomery, Edmund Pettus Bridge, all evoke horrific images of Black suffering at the hands of vicious, hateful domestic white terrorists.

Richard Friedman

To all who had seen The Minister in the racial crucible of America reclaiming the Civil Rights Movement’s original purpose and raising the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s forgotten writings, he was a brilliant example of the grace, power, and dignity that The Minister brings to EVERY movement he makes. He used every occasion of his visit not only to remind us of the greatness of Dr. King, but to rescue him from the image-killers and propagandists who would reduce this great thinker to a mere slogan.

The Minister’s first stop in Alabama was in Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park, the 4-acre plot of sacred soil that was the scene of the government’s brutalization of Black women and children—its own citizens—on May 3rd of 1963. The news footage of Black churchgoers being set upon by police dogs and blasted with fire hoses is so seared in the consciousness of the world that it has become the American Blackman’s Zapruder film. The park sits across from the symbolic civil rights cathedral, the 16th Street Baptist Church, where 135 days after that horrific Ingram Park pogrom four little Black girls were blown up by dynamite in a terrorist attack. The Minister’s presence at this holy epicenter was incredibly meaningful.

While Minister Farrakhan was extensively quoting Dr. King, Richard Friedman, executive director of the Birmingham Jewish Federation, tried to explain why Jews were absent from both the rally and the voting rights issue. “The Federation only takes positions on issues where a clear consensus exists within the Jewish community and…there is a diversity of opinion in the Jewish community regarding the need for continued federal monitoring.” This itself is not surprising. After having used the foot soldiers of the Black struggle to secure their own legal and economic rights, Jews snatched their money and support away from the Black freedom movement and booked. They have since enjoyed unprecedented prosperity beyond that of all other segments of White people. But even “diversity of opinion” could not keep them from making themselves known for what they have always been—the bedrock of Alabama’s anti-Black, apartheid infrastructure.

Let us deal with three remarkable sentences Friedman posted in a statement titled “FARRAKHAN’S PARK PRESENCE INSULTS DR. KING’S LEGACY.” In language that better fits the world of Jerry Springer or Maury Povitch, Friedman proposes that The Minister’s presence was “creepy.” He elaborates: “Creepy is the best word to describe it. Behind his dapper attire and charismatic exterior lurks an enemy of the Jewish people. His very presence on this sacred Civil Rights era battlefield was an insult to Dr. King who envisioned and sacrificed his life for an America free of bigotry.”

Friedman, a Jew, here professes the power to channel the hopes, dreams, and “vision” of the Black leader Martin Luther King. Let us be clear: The Minister was invited to participate in the “Never Forget, Never Again Pilgrimage” to save Section Five of the Voting Rights Act by a coalition of wise leaders, including Alabama state senator Hank Sanders, Tuskegee mayor Johnny Ford, and Dr. Charles Steele, CEO of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization that the Reverend Martin Luther King himself led as its first president. Certainly, Dr. Steele, who was inducted into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Board of Preachers of Morehouse College, would be a clearer and more direct channel of Dr. King’s point of view. And since Dr. King and his wife, Coretta, were personal acquaintances of The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the very source of Minister Farrakhan’s immense wisdom, Friedman’s claim to know what “insults” Dr. King is beneath nonsense. Further, is there any doubt where Dr. King would stand on the Supreme Court issue of voting rights in 2013? According to Friedman, he and his people are on the opposite side.

The fact is, Friedman’s hostility and belligerence are designed to conceal the heretofore-secret relationship between Alabama’s Blacks and Jews. The Jews of Alabama—and throughout the South, for that matter—have always supported Black slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Early on Jews flooded into the state to profit from the booming world market in slave-picked cotton. Mayer Lehman and his brothers were just one of many such Jewish cotton-trading firms that dealt in thousands of bales yearly and who built their massive wealth on the suffering of African slaves. When the Jewish Encyclopedia wrote “The cotton-plantations in many parts of the South were wholly in the hands of the Jews, and as a consequence slavery found its advocates among them,” they were talking of Richard Friedman’s brethren—not Farrakhan’s.

Alabama Jews fought against Abraham Lincoln to maintain Black slavery, and when they lost the Civil War they feared the loss of their unpaid cotton-picking African slaves. So they financed the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Blacks into remaining on the plantations as sharecroppers long after Emancipation. Where did you THINK American Jewish wealth came from?!

When Dr. King arose to confront the injustices of a society that has enriched so many Jews, Birmingham’s Jews stood firmly against him, even going so far as to financially back the notorious American Nazi, Eugene “Bull” Connor—the man who unleashed the dogs and fire hoses in Kelly Ingram Park!

But that is not the worst of it. For the last 50 years Birmingham’s Jews have been hiding the fact that one of the most vicious race haters in America was the spiritual leader of Richard Friedman’s own synagogue! In the 1960s, Rabbi Milton Grafman led Temple Emanu-El, which to this day still honors its race-hating clergyman with its Grafman Endowment Fund. So destructive were the rabbi’s actions to racial justice that Dr. King criticized him directly in his famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”

It is rarely asked why Dr. King was in that jail to begin with. He was leading protests against the anti-Black practices of the major downtown retailers, including the Parisian, Pizitz’s, Blach’s, and Loveman’s. All these stores were Jewish-owned, and all insulted Black shoppers daily with their apartheid drinking fountains, segregated lunch counters and bathrooms, and all-White sales clerks. And all were members of Rabbi Grafman’s Temple Emanu-El synagogue. Instead of standing with Dr. King for justice, these Jewish merchants used their immense financial power with the city to throw him in Birmingham jail. Dr. King could easily have been referring to Jews when he wrote: “Why is equality so assiduously avoided? Why does White America delude itself, and how does it rationalize the evil it retains?”

Rabbi Milton Grafman

And how did Rabbi Milton Grafman—Richard Friedman’s rabbi—rationalize his city’s evil as children were being bombed, as hoses flattened Black church-goers, as Black shoppers drank “negro” water from “negro” fountains in Jewish department stores, as Dr. King sat in a cold, dark cell? Rabbi Grafman publicly decreed: “The lives of one thousand Negroes are not worth a hair on the head of a single Jew.” Think about that statement, then think about the history of the Civil Rights Movement, and try to find a comparable anti-Black expression of grotesque inhumanity from any White Gentile segregationist.

Let us “Never Forget” that the collected bile of notorious haters like Rabbi Grafman, George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Lester Maddox, and Bull Connor had its source in the Jewish Talmud, a book of tricks and lies crafted by the rabbis of ancient times. Foreseeing the immense profits of African slavery, these Talmudic troublemakers invented the CURSE OF HAM, a myth made up out of whole cloth that makes God Himself the author of racism and justifies Black slavery!

Grafman’s “one-Jewish-hair” statement—which reduces the value of 1,000 Black lives to less than a strand of hair—carries into modern times a hate-filled Jewish tradition thousands of years old.

Who ARE these people?! We are blessed to have the answer in the red-letter words of Jesus Himself, who made a powerful distinction between Jews in Revelation 2:9 and 3:9. “I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.” In fact, those “Jews” who operate from Rabbi Grafman’s twisted, hateful and creepy racial belief system are the Synagogue of Satan. Who else could they be? Would the God of Freedom, Justice, Equality, and Righteousness ever choose such a people, a people whose wealth is based in slavery, sharecropping, exploitation, and Jim Crow apartheid?

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan presented a crystal-clear choice to Blacks and Jews in Alabama. And so did Richard Friedman. In A Torchlight for America Minister Farrakhan writes, “It’s not one’s maleness or femaleness, being Black or being White, rather it is our growth and reflection of knowledge that distinguishes us from the lower forms of life.”

Now it’s just a Friedman’s Choice.

[Next in Part 2: “Minister Farrakhan’s Encounter With Anne Frank—in Birmingham?”]

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