White Devils Strike New Orleans
By Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 15, 2005

Weeks after leftists began claiming President Bush’s environmental policies and budget cuts caused Hurricane Katrina’s devastation – and that Bush did not dispatch federal aid workers to Louisiana more quickly because of the victims’ skin color – the Left’s politics of perpetual demonization have reached their logical conclusion: one seasoned race-baiter has accused the president of ordering one of New Orleans’ levees dynamited to kill black people.

“I heard from a very reliable source, who saw a 25-foot deep crater under the levee breach,” said Louis Farrakhan, spiritual leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI). “It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry.” Minister Farrakhan made the charge Monday in Charlotte, North Carolina, where many of the hurricane’s evacuees had been taken (at federal expense).

Farrakhan was in town to drum up support for next month’s “Millions More Movement,” a 10th anniversary tribute to the “Million Man March,” which is scheduled to take place at the National Mall one month from today. As FrontPage Magazine columnist Don Feder noted in an exclusive story, this follow-up rally has been endorsed by no less than Bill Clinton, who called it “a very positive idea.” (No word on whether the first black president was Farrakhan’s knowledgeable source.)

Farrakhan had been active in New Orleans itself before the hurricane, having trained a contingent of his security corps, the “Fruit of Islam,” there. The elite, all-male FOI claims to guard NOI events and low-income housing projects, although some claim the organization is a paramilitary force. (Not without foundation. NOI’s Abdul (William) Sharrieff Muhammad once clarified, “We have a military structure that we train our men into.”)

Other radical black leaders have joined Farrakhan on the ground in exploiting the hurricane’s victims and spreading their hateful ideologies. In an official press release, racial separatist Malik Zulu Shabazz, head of the New Black Panther Party, describes New Orleans thus:

“Wholesale police brutality is being waged against the victims of this natural disaster.” The police (sniper units) are using tactics to provoke attacks by Black residents as to substantiate their reasons of opening fire on groups of black males randomly and indiscriminately…According to Shabazz, “this is more of a racist occupation of subjugation rather than a relief effort.”

Shabazz also wondered why Bush didn’t accept Fidel Castro’s goodwill offer to send Cuban medics to tend Katrina’s casualties.

The NBPP takes the president’s mother to task, as well. Its press release states MSNBC’s “Keith Oberman” reported that Barbara Bush said, “the conditions in the Dome are sufficient enough for those people [the evacuees] since they were underprivileged anyway.” You can read the former First Lady’s actual words here. (To be fair, Olbermann is probably sorry he didn’t fabricate the quotation first.)

CNSNews.com sums up, “The (N)ew Black Panther Party said the system is designed [in Shabazz’s words] ‘to keep non-white people in state of subjugation on all levels and they are viewed as expendable in order to protect the interest of the system.’”

Such sentiments are sadly not reserved to fringe figures like Farrakhan and Shabazz. Political figures, foreign and domestic, share their off-the-wall views. Foreign leaders, particularly from Africa, have voiced similar critiques. Chen Chimutengwende, the acting Information Minister of Robert Mugabe’s Marxist kleptocracy, Zimbabwe, said, “This hurricane has once more exposed the racism of the American administration against black people because if it had been white people affected, they would have moved faster.”

News outlets have quoted an unnamed Kenyan official, who decided Bush is guilty until proven innocent: “There is no evidence to prove that the U.S. government delayed to assist the people of New Orleans because they were blacks, but given the history of the U.S., everything points at racial profiling…[A]t the moment, unless we are given a watertight excuse, it is racism at its worst.”

At least one well-known Democratic Congresswoman shares these conspiratorial sentiments, expressing them in her own familiar, over-the-top cadences. In a floor speech last week, Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Dementia, favorably quoted former Black Panther Party member Malik Rahin as an authoritative source of information, reading into the Congressional Record Rahin’s allegation that the authorities allowed roving gangs of white vigilantes to roam the streets of New Orleans “unchecked,” to the verge of starting a “race riot.”

This was, indeed, an underreported phenomenon.

She belittled “the ruthless sybaritic power player elites” running the country, before weeping, “As I saw the African-Americans, mostly African-American families ripped apart, I could only think about slavery, families ripped apart, herded into what looked like concentration camps.”

McKinney – who once intimated President Bush had advance knowledge of 9/11 and balked at voting for a resolution to condemn Farrakhan – stated the new lynch mobs of New Orleans were perhaps the last in a long series of anti-black conspiracies led by the federal government:

In about 20, 25 universities around the country we have got biodefense labs studying I do not know what. I can remember the Tuskegee Study. I remember MK-Ultra as an African American. I remember Paul Robeson. But Tulane University is under water, and Tulane University houses one of these biodefense labs. We need to know what the heck was in that lab, what was going on in that biodefense lab.

She then discovered a heretofore unknown plot to suppress C-SPAN...because the network allows her to speak. “Thank goodness, I can come to the floor of the House and speak my piece,” she said. “And as long as C-SPAN cameras are running, well, it will not be cut off, but I understand there is even an effort to try and limit C-SPAN's access to American households.”

She ended an incredibly disjointed speech – even by her standards – by endorsing conspiracies qua conspiracies:

I will just conclude by saying that on the United States State Department website is [an item entitled], “How to identify misinformation.” [It asks:] Does the story fit the pattern of a conspiracy theory?

Her remarks echoed and endorsed by name rapper Kanye West. NBC cameras cut away from West at a celebrity fundraiser for Hurricane Katrina victims on September 2 after the gangsta launched into an unscripted political rant. “George Bush does not care about black people,” he said. Like Rahin and McKinney, West would say the government has “given [National Guardsmen] permission to go down and shoot us.”

Influential Princeton professor, rap artist, and honorary Democratic Socialists of America chairman Cornell West also seconded West’s remarks. In an op-ed published in the UK Observer (owned by the same company as the far-Left Guardian newspaper) on 9/11, West concluded, “When Kanye West said the President [sic.] does not care about black people, he was right.”

Now we see how far the Hate Whitey Left will go to popularize the fiction of bloodthirsty racist Republicans: charges of genocide in the aftermath of one of the worst natural disasters in modern history.

This would offer a spectacular “Sister Souljah moment” to any responsible politician on the Left seeking higher office in 2008. It would seem there is no such person, judging by the deafening silence.

Ellie