Notorious antisemite and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan live-streamed a three-hour Independence Day rant on YouTube where he calls prominent Jewish Americans, including Jonathan Greenblatt and Alan Dershowitz, “Satan,” as well as repeating the lie Israel was behind George Floyd’s killing.
The Combat Anti-Semitism Movement (CAM) on Wednesday called on YouTube to remove the video, saying it was “in clear contravention of YouTube’s own policies on hate speech.”
Farrakhan’s Fourth of July address also aired Saturday on Revolt TV, a cable channel owned by Sean “Diddy” Combs. Combs encouraged his 15.6 million Twitter followers to watch the video, tweeting “Everyone can watch…Just not the scared ones.”
Everyone can watch… Just not the scared ones.
— Diddy (@Diddy) July 4, 2020
In the address, the 87-year-old Nation of Islam leader called the head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Jonathan Greenblatt, “Satan.”
“Mr. Greenblatt, you are Satan. Those of you that say that you’re Jews, I will not even give you the honor of calling you a Jew. You are not a Jew… you are Satan and it is my job now to pull the cover off of Satan so that every Muslim when he sees Satan, pick up a stone, as we do in Mecca,” Farrakhan said.
“When you know who Satan is, you don’t have to kill him [but] the stone of truth, that’s what you throw. We cast truth at falsehood till we knock out its brains,” he continued.
He also called Jewish renowned defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz “a skillful deceiver” and “Satan masquerading as a lawyer.”
Farrakhan also implicated Israel in the death of George Floyd and in police violence in general.
“That’s why you gotta come at us like a coward,” he said. “Like snakes trying to wrap yourself around us so you could give us the treatment that you were taught in Israel. You may, as you gonna stop your police from going to Israel to learn how to kill better.”
“Your days of killing us without consequence are over,” he added.
Greenblatt took to Twitter to respond to Farrakhan’s “trademark antisemitism.”
“This is routine for Farrakhan- give him a platform, he never fails to espouse hatred,” Greenblatt said.
CAM Director Sacha Roytman-Dratwa wrote in a letter addressed to Matt Halprin, YouTube’s vice president of global trust and safety:
Louis Farrakhan has a long history of antisemitism, incorporating it into the very legitimate, important fight for civil rights and equality. His perversion of these values by promoting hatred and dehumanization of Jews is quite simply unacceptable.
According to CAM, by allowing the video, which has garnered nearly 900,000 views in three days, to remain on its site, “YouTube is allowing him to hijack the worthy cause of racial justice and use the video sharing site as a platform for anti-Semitism.”
“[Farrakhan] even suggested the Jewish community seeks to kill him, saying, ‘If you [Jews] make that move, I can guarantee your destruction,'” the letter reads.
In his address, Farrakhan bizarrely attempted to disavow accusations of antisemitism.
“They tell lies to make you think I am a bigot or antisemite, so that you won’t listen to what I’m saying. So far they’ve been pretty successful,” he said.
“If you really think I hate the Jewish people, you don’t know me at all. [I’ve never] uttered the words of death to the Jewish people,” he went on.
In the past his rancorous antisemitic rants have included calling Jews members of the “Synagogue of Satan” and claiming Jesus called the Jews “the children of the devil.”
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he was not surprised by Farrakhan’s remarks.
“At this stage of history, no one can be surprised by the rants of America’s Godfather of antisemitism,” he told The Algemeiner.
Cooper also condemned Farrakhan’s “lurid antisemitic conspiracy linking the Jewish state to the death of George Floyd.”
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