John Podhoretz and Patterico highlight a close connection between Barack Obama and Khalid Muhammad. Obama, as we know, was a disciple of Derrick Bell; in the video that Breitbart.com released a few days ago, he urged his listeners to open their hearts and minds to Bells teachings. So, what were Bells teachings?
Bell was a fervent admirer of Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammad of the Nation of Islam. Podhoretz quotes a 1994 interview in which Bell said, We should really appreciate the Louis Farrakhans and the Khalid Muhammads while weve got them. Our readers are well aware of the repellent Farrakhan, but who was Khalid Muhammad? Patterico gives us Muhammads Kill the Cracker speech, in which Muhammad, whom Derrick Bell so admired, advocated genocide:
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And he declared that blacks, in retribution against South African whites of the apartheid era, should kill the women,
kill the children,
kill the babies,
kill the blind,
kill the crippled,
kill the *********,
kill the lesbian,
kill them all.
On subsequent occasions, Muhammad praised Colin Ferguson, a black man who had shot some twenty white and Asian commuters (killing six of them) in a racially motivated 1993 shooting spree aboard a New York commuter train, as a hero who possessed the courage to just kill every ******n cracker that he saw. He advised blacks that [t]here are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes.
So: Barack Obama was a very public admirer of Derrick Bell, and Bell was a very public admirer of the genocidal Khalid Muhammad. There is at least one more connection that may be relevant:
In 1998 Muhammad became Chairman of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), which evolved from a number of small, loosely connected groups in Milwaukee and Dallas that had been established around 1989 by Aaron Michaels.
Muhammad continued his work with NBPP, striving to foster interracial hatred and ultimately a full-blown race war in the United States, until he died unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm on February 17, 2001, at the age of 53, in Atlanta.
It was, of course, members of the New Black Panther party in Philadelphia who had been convicted of voter intimidation in 2009 when Barack Obamas Department of Justice made the extraordinary decision to drop the case even though it had already been won as a result of the defendants default.
It is noteworthy, too, that the relevant events outlined above occurred in the same time period. It was 1990 when Obama publicly endorsed Derrick Bell, and he continued to be a Bell acolyte through his graduation from law school in 1991, and no doubt beyond then: he has never made any attempt to distance himself from Bells racist theories or to criticize Bell in any way. Louis Farrakhan was notorious long before then, and Khalid Muhammad was the Nation of Islams National Spokesman by 1985.
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At no time has Barack Obama ever disavowed his radical associations of those days. Nor were these youthful follies; Obama was within two months of 30 years old when he graduated from law school.
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The brief video showing Obama endorsing, and then hugging, Derrick Bell was not in itself spectacular. But Obamas unqualified support of Bell sheds considerable light on the presidents world-view, given Bells long track record of promulgating racist theories and endorsing far-out, homicidal radicals like Khalid Muhammad.
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The unsavory associations of his earlier years are certainly relevant; we should not forget, for example, that Obama was 34 years old when he launched his first campaign in Bill Ayerss and Bernadine Dohrns living room, at a time when Dohrns enthusiastic approval of the Charles Manson murders was well-remembered. But in order to be meaningful to voters, Obamas radicalism must be linked to the actions he and his appointees have taken since January 2009.
