And now the following from that esteemed author, Andrae Crouch....oh wait that's the singer. I meant Stanley Crouch:
"Secretary of State James Baker once said that the free advice from a man who offered his
opinions often was worth what the secretary had paid for it.
This is how blacks in America need to take Ayman al-Zawahiri's recent tape praising Malcolm X and condemning Barack Obama.
RELATED: AL-QAIDA NO. 2 CALLS OBAMA A "SLAVE" TO WHITE MASTERS
As Osama Bin Laden's top deputy, Zawahiri knows a mark when he sees one and believes black Americans to be a collective chump gullible enough to be swayed by arguments against Obama that try to smack him with the dead horse of black nationalism.
The threatening video issued last week was intended to whip up support for what is known as radical Islam by using a martyr to a lost cause, Malcolm X.
Malcolm X was one of the naysayers to American possibility whose vision was permanently crushed beneath the heel of Obama's victory on Nov. 4. Though his ideas had nothing to do with the ultimate form of nonviolence - voting - those desperate to praise him will pretend now that he was actually a civil rights leader! This has been going on for an unforgivably long time, especially among black academics.
Malcolm X had nothing to do with Obama's accomplishment as did none of the other militants who preached their own version of separatism and gleefully attacked the civil rights movement as offering no more than pie in the sky and misleading black people.
So Malcolm X was no more than a charismatic heckler of the civil rights movement and a man whose career was soaked in racism, potted history and absurd ideas of one sort or another. He was a good rabble-rouser and he was a good saber rattler. On Feb. 21, 1965, he was murdered in public as one of the victims of the tribal wars that distinguished radical black nationalist cults and purported "revolutionary" leadership like the Black Panthers.
If not for Spike Lee's film about him, Malcolm X would have been forgotten. His legacy did not add up to inspiring one important piece of legislation, leading one important march or actually getting anything done that had objective significance...."
I knew this article was going to be fucked up when the brother started off by quoting James Baker.
Okay Stanley (May I call you Stanley? You seemed to be one of those new Negroes who want to be addressed properly. Dr. Crouch, Mr. Crouch....) here is the deal: I agree with the first part of your hypothesis, that Al Qaida's number two totally misread the African American psyche. To believe that African Americans would fall for a collective okey doke, and call out a president that finally looked like the rest of us was just plain foolish. It was a sign that the man has been clearly living in a cave over these past years for sure.
But Stanley, you haven't been living in cave (Well, you do live in New York.... never mind) so you should know better. Your conclusion about Malcolm X and the civil rights struggle is totally without merit. Yes he was a "good rabble-rouser" and guess what, at the time, that is exactly what the civil rights movement needed, a rabble-rouser. Revisionist history is always nice, but you need to understand that none of those leaders and folks who stepped out to the forefront of the civil rights movement did it in a vacuum. They all played a role in bringing about needed change in the white establishment. An establishment that was not going to relinquish power to your black ass no matter how many marches and sit ins you had. Everyone from H. Rap Brown; to John Lewis; to Rosa Parks; to the Panthers; to Cheney, Schwerner, Goodman, and the little girls who lost their lives in Birmingham (when those animals bombed their church), to.... yes Stanley, even Malcolm, contributed. His O ness can walk on all of their shoulders. The irony is, that unlike you, I bet he would tell us that. He, unlike you, seems to know his place in history and how he got there.
How soon we forget. So now, thanks to Stanley, we know that A-merry-ca was the shining beacon on a hill all along. And it was just a matter of time before we all came around to our senses and realized that we are all equals in the greatest country on god's green earth. Poor Stanley.
For you to write that Malcolm X had nothing to do with creating the environment to allow Obama to accomplish what he has, only proves how prescient and how much foresight Malcolm X really had. After all, didn't he talk about Negroes like you in one of his speeches?
Hat tip to Tariq Nelson over at the Afrospear for hipping me to this story.
