Black America’s Cargo Cult
2nd April 2011
John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, listens to Calypso Louis Farrakhan.
I also have a soft spot for black church oratory. I don’t have a religious bone in my body, but taken simply as an art form, this stuff can be quite striking. Al Sharpton, for example, who is an ignorant buffoon in all matters that actually engage my powers of reasoning, is a terrific preacher, with cadences and rhythms really quite musical. I could listen to him for … well, not hours, but quite a lot of minutes.
The really striking thing about the address was the almost total absence of anything Islamic in it. Most of the themes and references were in fact Christian.
Some part of the antisemitism shtick is Holocaust envy — resentment that any other people should claim to have endured suffering comparable to the black man’s. In Ireland the whinier section of the republican movement is scoffed at as “the MOPE faction,” where MOPE stands for “Most Oppressed People Ever.” Nobody in the Rosemont stadium — certainly not Farrakhan — nursed any doubt that black Americans are MOPE.
NOI is in fact just Christianity with a thin coat of Islamic paint.