MALIK ZULU SHABAZZ

This article is a must read for anyone who thought that the gathering in Washington, DC last weekend was a peaceful one. This article is about one of the organizers of the "Million More "EXCUSES" March" held last weekend. MALIK ZULU SHABAZZ. Leader of the New Black Panther Party and close associate of Calypso Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, One of the Largest "Legitimatized" Hate groups in the Unites States of America.


Racist and anti-Semite

Leader of New Black Panther Party

"The only solution any time there is a funeral in the black community, is a funeral in the police community."

"Kill every goddamn Zionist in Israel! Goddamn little babies, goddamn old ladies! Blow up Zionist supermarkets!"

"America should be glad that every black man is not on a killing spree for all the suffering they [white Americans] have done."

"If any racist, straw-chewin' tobacco-chewin' racist redneck lays their hand on any black man or woman in this county, crush that devil that is trying to do you harm and to do you evil in the name of God and in accordance with your legal rights."

Born Paris Lewis, Malik Zulu Shabazz has become an increasingly well known figure in radical Black Muslim politics since the early 1990s and currently heads the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), whose twin hallmarks are anti-white and anti-Semitic hatred. A practicing attorney and frequent speaker on college campuses, Shabazz earned a Bachelor's degree from Howard University and a J.D. from Howard University Law School. During his undergraduate years at Howard, he was an aggressive campus organizer and in 1988 founded Unity Nation, a self-described "black revolutionary" student group. Shabazz's militant temperament caught the eye of the Khalid Abdul Muhammad, protégé of Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan; Muhammad called the young man "one of the greatest student leaders of all time." Notorious for his venomous anti-white and anti-Jewish rhetoric, Muhammad would soon become Shabazz's revered mentor who, according to Shabazz, "helped to shape my life and was a captain and minister over me."

The other major influence on Shabazz's thought was the anti-Semite and racist, Louis Farrakhan. Shabazz cites his personal meeting with Farrakhan as a watershed moment in his development as a radical black nationalist. "I met Minister Louis Farrakhan on my college campus and it absolutely changed my life," says Shabazz.

After graduating from Howard University Law School and passing the bar exam, Shabazz worked as a campaign aide and spokesman for Marion Barry, the three-term Washington, D.C. mayor who served a six-month federal prison term stemming from his 1990 arrest for cocaine possession. During this same period, Shabazz became a member of the rap music group the Defiant Giants; he went by the stage name "Zulu King Paris" and helped record the album Rise, Black Man, Rise.

Soon thereafter, Shabazz became a member of the Nation of Islam, and in 1995 helped organize and promote Farrakhan's "Million Man March" in Washington, DC. The day before the "Million Man March" (which was held on October 16), a number of NOI devotees organized, as a preview to the following day's activities, an event billed as the "Black African Holocaust Nationhood Conference." Shabazz served as master of ceremonies, telling those in attendance that blacks were little more than outcasts of American society. Whites, he said, "made…colleges and institutions, black and white, not to free us but to make us better servants of white folks. Where's your proof? Look at our condition. . . . The matter of fact is we [are] still niggers in America." "The Caucasians and the Government are arrogant," he added, "telling us how to suffer. America should be glad that every black man is not on a killing spree for all the suffering they [white Americans] have done."

The highly anticipated climax of the proceedings began when Shabazz introduced the event's final scheduled speaker, Khalid Abdul Muhammad. With the audience standing and cheering, Shabazz said, "We wanna bring on a man who gives the white man nightmares. We wanna bring on a man who makes the Jews pee in they [sic] pants at night. He's like black Raid on white roaches." At that point, Muhammad stepped to the microphone and addressed the frenzied crowd:

"I came [today] to place the blame squarely where it belongs. I didn't come to pin the tail on the donkey. I came to pin the tail on the honky….We want to try the white man today. We want to hold court on this devil today, hold court on this cracker. . . . And we will find this cracker guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, with moral certainty, and with no recommendation for mercy. . . . We gonna keep this cracker on death row with no possibility for a stay of execution. . . . There must be a time and a generation that will rise up…and take our political prisoners from this no-good, low-down, dirty white man. …[T]he white man is the coldest, most vicious one that has ever lived….[on]the planet earth."

When personal differences eventually led Farrakhan to expel Muhammad from NOI, Muhammad quickly found a new calling as a central figure in the New Black Panther Party, which was formed from small, loosely connected groups in Milwaukee and Dallas that had been established around 1989. By 1997, Shabazz had followed his mentor into the NBPP, rising to become the party's National Attorney and National Spokesman.

In 1998 Shabazz was named "Young Lawyer of the Year" by the National Bar Association, the leading black lawyers' association in the United States. That same year, he ran unsuccessfully for the Washington, D.C. city council, garnering just 8 percent of the vote and finishing a distant fifth in the election. In September 1998, Shabazz co-organized an NBPP-sponsored "Million Youth March" in Harlem, New York, which drew only a sparse crowd and ended in clashes with city police. Prior to that event, Shabazz threatened to kill any officers who might "interfere" with the proceedings. He told the marchers, "The only solution any time there is a funeral in the black community, is a funeral in the police community."

When 53-year-old Khalid Abdul Muhammad died unexpectedly in February 2001, Shabazz was disconsolate. Said Shabazz about Muhammad's passing: "I was beyond hurt. I was devastated. I was crushed. I was almost disoriented to a degree because we never expected Khalid Abdul Muhammad to leave us. He was so strong. He was so beautiful. He was so brilliant. The only thing that saved me was immediately following up on his work." On another occasion Shabazz said, in tribute to the late revolutionary, "I could never thank God enough for a bold bald-headed black man who taught me what I know, and I come in his spirit today in what seems to be walking in his footsteps. A bold, bald-headed black man. Uncompromising and fearless - the enemy didn't like him. But I love him. The minister and doctor Khalid Abdul Muhammad."

With Muhammad gone, Shabazz took the reins of the NBPP and relocated the organization's headquarters from New York to Washington, DC. Soon thereafter he organized a boycott of a local Korean-American-owned store after a dispute between the merchant and a black teenage girl had resulted in a fight that was caught on videotape. Shabazz and the NBPP staged a week-long protest on the sidewalk in front of the store, the demonstrators chanting, "Death to the Bloodsucker"; the store was eventually firebombed, though Shabazz and the NBPP claimed no connection to that incident.

As head of the NBPP, Shabazz traveled to various cities across the United States — among them Cincinnati (Ohio), Louisville (Kentucky), and Decatur (Alabama) — to recruit new members, stirring their passions by spreading the message that police brutality against black Americans was reaching epidemic proportions. In large part as a result of Shabazz's efforts, the NBPP has grown into an organization with 47 separate chapters. Having thus proven his ability to get results, Shabazz was appointed by Louis Farrakhan to be a Co-Convener of the "Millions More Movement" marking the tenth anniversary of the "Million Man March" (in October 2005).

Like his mentors Muhammad and Farrakhan, Shabazz views the United States as an evil nation. He has characterized America's Founding Fathers as "snakes" and terrorists. In 2003 he recorded a rap album featuring excerpts of his speeches and titled Amerikkka's Most Hated (the corrupted spelling of "America" - a trope of the Sixties terrorist group, the Weathermen - signified the nation's allegedly intractable and omnipresent white racism). In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Shabazz defended Osama bin Laden and blamed President George W. Bush for the horrors of that day. At a reparations rally in 2002, Shabazz blustered, "The President wants to talk about a terrorist named bin Laden. I don't want to talk about bin Laden. I want to talk about a terrorist called Christopher Columbus. I want to talk about a terrorist called George Washington. I want to talk about a terrorist called [New York City Mayor] Rudy Giuliani. The real terrorists have always been the United Snakes of America."

Over time, Shabazz shifted blame for the 9/11 attacks alternately from President Bush and an allegedly imperialist white America generally, to Jews in particular. In an October 2001 press conference, for instance, he charged that Israel was behind the devastation. In a similar vein, at a July 3, 2003 press conference in Morristown, New Jersey, he intimated that Jewish conspirators had possessed exclusive foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and had saved their own lives that day by not going to their jobs in the World Trade Center, the main target of the suicide hijackers. "If 3,000 people perished in the World Trade Center attacks and the Jewish population is 10 percent," said Shabazz, "you show me records of 300 Jewish people dying in the World Trade Center. . . . We're daring anyone to dispute its truth. They [the Jews] got their people out." (Notably, Shabazz's statistics regarding the Jewish population were in gross error. As of 2001, there were 5.2 million Jews in the United States, a mere 1.9 percent of the American population.)

Like Angela Davis, Shabazz believes that all black prisoners should be set free, on grounds that they could not possibly have been tried fairly in a racist nation. In 2002 Shabazz expressed his solidarity with then-murder suspect Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the former H. Rap Brown, who was ultimately convicted of killing a black sheriff's deputy in Georgia. Shabazz is also a devoted supporter of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal. In 2003 Shabazz created Black Lawyers for Justice (BLFJ), a legal organization professing a dedication to the defense of human and civil rights -- but in reality promoting the notion that black inmates have been unjustly railroaded into their prison cells.

Shabazz's call for the release of black inmates is consistent with the ideals of the original Black Panther Party that was established in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. While the NBPP has an identity separate from that of the former organization - and has been attacked by the old Panther guard for "stealing" the name, Shabazz is adamant about keeping the faith. "We love Brother Huey Newton," says Shabazz. "We love the Panthers of the 1960s but the New Black Panther Party, by and large, reads and studies the Teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and we respect the leadership of Minister Louis Farrakhan."

Notwithstanding Shabazz's laudatory words about Newton, there is no love lost between veterans of the old group and the new. Panther co-founder Bobby Seale calls the NBPP "xenophobic idiots" with a religious agenda. "They're a bunch of idiot extremists in the same way that a racist Ku Klux Klan and a racist Nazi is," Seale elaborates.

While Shabazz has been outspoken about many topics, he reserves a special measure of vitriol for Jews. Promoting the now-discredited notion that Jews played a major role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, he states that Jews "are absolutely in fear today, of a message that will come to the student that will expose their involvement in their crimes, historically and presently against Black people. Just white people in general are in fear of Black people really knowing their history and really knowing the involvement of white people in destroying us, destroying and robbing us of our name, our language, our religion, our culture, our God. . . . [T]he number one opponent in Black history has been white racism and white attacks on Black people."

At Howard University in April 1994, Shabazz said, "I say to all Jewish people and all white people . . . stop pushing your Holocaust down my throat, when the black holocaust is the worst holocaust humanity has ever seen." Five months later at the same school, he warned, "We will never bow down to the white, Jewish, Zionist onslaught."

Regarding the Mideast conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, Shabazz has said: "The New Black Panther Party stands in 100 percent solidarity with the Palestinian people. As you know, we're strong opponents of Zionism. We're strong opponents of the U.S. policy of strictly supporting Israel. We find no legal or legitimate basis, really for the existence of the Zionist state. The current negotiation process, to us, is a negotiation by force. It is a potential settlement based on the gun of the Israeli at the head of the oppressed Palestinians. I say to the Palestinian people to continue to stand up and continue to resist and never forget the blood of the martyrs that went before them. . . ."

On another occasion Shabazz said, "Who's the real racists? Is it me or is it the Zionists? Who? Who? Who went in crushin' over two million Palestinians outta that land? Then they kept startin' wars with their Arab neighbors to grab more and more land; that's part of what Zionism is, to take as much land as they can. If they could get away with it they'd swallow up Gaza. If they could get away with it they'd swallow up — uh . . . the West Bank, they'd swallow up Jordan. They'd swallow up the Golan Heights. If they could get away with it. . . . How can you be a Jew and say you [sic] a Zionist? How can you be a Jew and participate in the taking of another people's land? And right — and ripping them off of their land and killing them on their land. They just bulldoze the houses! Drove them off the land and today they say they don't even have the right to return. . . . Look at what they do to the Palestinians, flyin' helicopters, shootin' missiles into they [sic] houses. Huh? They don't like em they just bulldoze your house. Take a bulldozer, bulldoze your houses. The blood of the Palestinians on the hands of the Zionists drips all the way down into the core of the planet Earth."

At an April 2002 protest outside B'nai B'rith headquarters in Washington, DC, he said, "Kill every goddamn Zionist in Israel! Goddamn little babies, goddamn old ladies! Blow up Zionist supermarkets!"

Shabazz's speeches are commonly laced with variations of the statement, "All praise is due to Allah. Black power! Black power! Black power! Black power!" He refers to blacks as "God's chosen people," and has borrowed his mentor Khalid Abdul Muhammad's signature phrase: "I didn't come to pin the tail on the donkey, I came to pin the tail on the racist honky!"

Even as he denounces what he perceives to be the scourge of white supremacy, Shabazz embraces his own philosophy of racial superiority - merely the mirror image of the worldview he ascribes to the legions of racist whites purportedly peppering the American landscape. "We [blacks] are the original people on the planet," says Shabazz. "We are responsible for the existence of the white race! The Bible says to honor your mother and your father if your days are to be long upon the land thy Lord thy God has given you. You are the mothers and the fathers of the brown man. The yellow man. And the white man and the white woman. And no matter how you look at these people you call niggers, no matter how you look down on black people, remember you're lookin' at your mother and lookin' at your your father. Huh? They should bow down when they see you in the hallways — bow down and kiss the feet of the black woman. And say if it were not for you, black woman, I wouldn't have even a biological chemical existence. Huh? Black Power! Black Power! . . . you are the original people but they don't want you to know it; according to them you're nothing but a nigger! Black Power! Black Power! . . . Our genes are dominant, white genes are recessive. A black man and a black woman can produce brown. You can produce red, queen! You can produce yellow! You can produce white and something that's whiter than white, a hundred and eighty degrees opposite in either direction! But if Bob and Jill — if Bob and Jill get together, they can do it all day, all night — they can produce nothing but a little white baby. It's because Mendel, the German scientist — I'm talkin' facts here now — Mendel the German scientist teaches us that dark genes are dominant and light genes are recessive. Black Power!"

Shabazz deems white racism an intractable societal ill that has endured long past the era of slavery. "This is not just slavery," he says. "[T]his is up until the 1940s, 1950s, a favorite habit of theirs [whites] is to take a black man and . . . take a rope and wrap it around his neck and hang him from a tree. Our holocaust did not last six years, our holocaust did not last 12 years, you talkin' about a 400-year holocaust! . . . We are the only ones who have been in a land that is not our own for 400 years, stripped of our name, our language, our religion, our culture, and our god. Huh? Castrate the black man! Take the black man, cut his genitals off! Take the genitals, ram it in his mouth and light the black man on fire! And they sit around eating popcorn and laugh about it! Huh? Havin' picnic, which really comes from the origin pick-a-nigger. Picnic comes from the origin pick a nigger! Pick a nigger to lynch and go an' get some food and popcorn and laugh about it! No genuine human being could lynch another human being without just cause and sit around and laugh and smile and eat popcorn about it. . . . The black man to them has always been a threat, and they get joy out of hanging the black man. They get joy out of either physically hanging you, or they get joy out of mentally and politically hanging you."

Shabazz reads American history as an unpunctuated narrative of white-perpetrated racism and oppression, a reality he says the schools are afraid to teach. "They teach you lies," he says. "George Washington was the father of our country. Thomas Jefferson was the father of our country. Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492. Is that what they teach? . . . Oh, but I know a different Christopher Columbus. I know a different George Washington. I know a different Thomas Jefferson. I know a Christopher Columbus that came to the West Indies or the Caribbean and wiped out the Arouak Indians! I . . . know a Christopher Columbus that came and began the holocaust of the Indians they wiped out — I'm talking about whitefolks. Wiped out 90 percent of the Indians in America, lied to the Indians over and over again, broke treaties, killed and murdered 90 percent of the Indians — straight-up genocide. . . . George Washington! What about the George Washington that raped black women? What about the George Washington that had as many slaves as are sitting in this room? George Washington was a hypocrite, claiming a country that's free and just for all at the same time tradin' black men and women like a keg of molaskus — a keg of molasses — a chicken or a keg of whisky. Ol' Thomas Jefferson, old wooden-teeth-wearin', wig-wearin' Thomas Jefferson, nothin' but a slave-master, a slave-owner, an Indian-killer. Andrew Jackson! Indian killers, slave traders, slave owners!"

In short, Shabazz considers white racism to be modern America's defining, ever-escalating attribute. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans in September 2005, for example, Shabazz visited that city and reported: "Wholesale police brutality is being waged against the [mostly black] victims of this natural disaster." He charged that police sniper units were trying to provoke black residents into behaviors that could justify "opening fire on groups of black males randomly and indiscriminately." According to Shabazz, when the storm hit New Orleans the American government treated black people as hostages and slaves, refusing to let them flee for safety. "[T]his is more of a racist occupation of subjugation rather than a relief effort," said Shabazz. As is invariably the case, Shabazz's perceptions about the circumstances surrounding the hurricane were indistinguishable from those of his beloved role model, Louis Farrakhan. Said Farrakhan, "I heard from a very reliable source, who saw a 25-foot deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry."

Given his hatred for white people, it is not at all surprising that Shabazz is a racial separatist. "The perfect world for us [blacks] would be . . . a nation of our own," he says. "We want our own land, factories and farms. We are tired of demonstrating against police brutality year after year, month after month, [saying] 'Please treat us right. Stop discriminating against us.' It seems almost impossible to achieve real justice within the confines of White racist America. So, the perfect world, of course, is a Black nation. The perfect world for us would be the Honorable Louis Farrakhan as our president and a Congress with our best politicians, scholars, researchers, thinkers and activists working under a divine chain of command."

At Al Sharpton's "Redeem the Dream" rally at the Lincoln Memorial in August 2000, Shabazz was a featured speaker and delivered what he titled his "I Have a Black Dream" speech, which specifically called for a race war in America. "For every casket and funeral in our community," he declared, "there should be a casket and funeral in the enemy's community." Shabazz was either unaware, or pretending to be unaware, that some 90 percent of all black murder victims in the United States are killed by black - not white - assailants. Notwithstanding this plain reality, Shabazz regularly trumpets his outrage over the alleged epidemic of white-on-black violence. "If any racist, straw-chewin' tobacco-chewin' racist redneck lays their hand on any black man or woman in this county," he said at an April 2001 news conference in Bowie, Maryland, "crush that devil that is trying to do you harm and to do you evil in the name of God and in accordance with your legal rights."

Shabazz also harbors deep contempt for homosexuals. In October 2000, Richard J. Rosendall, an openly gay writer and the former president of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, D.C., sent Shabazz an email needling him about his poor showing as a candidate in the aforementioned 1998 city council election in Washington, DC. "Although it was ill-mannered," explains Rosendall, "I could not restrain myself and added provocatively, 'I have always loved the Black Panthers' paramilitary get-up, particularly the black berets, which I think are wonderfully homoerotic. . . . Now be honest: isn't all this strutting and posturing at least partly intended to appeal to white people's Mandingo Complex?" Shabazz issued the following response to Rosendall, in all capital letters:

"LEAVE ME ALONE SICK LITTLE FAGGOT. THATS WHY WE HAD A STANDING ROOM ONLY 800 PLUS CROWD AT THE MASONIC TEMPLE LAST THURSDAY, MEETING ON HOW TO RUN DEVILS LIKE YOU OUTTA HERE. . . . WE ARE BUILDING A BLACK POWER ARMY RIGHT IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD. SINCE YOU LIKE PANTHER GEAR, (IN A FREAKY SICK SADO MASOCHIST-SATANIC WAY), I WILL SPARE YOU A PAIR OF BLACK STEEL TOE BOOTS UP YOUR ASS. I FEAR YOU WILL ENJOY THAT. YOU WILL GET CRUSHED, LITTLE DEVIL, IN SELF DEFENSE."