Home / News / Israel / YouTube pressured to remove 3-hour antisemitic speech by Louis Farrakhan

YouTube pressured to remove 3-hour antisemitic speech by Louis Farrakhan

A public campaign has been launched to persuade YouTube to remove a video of the notoriously antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s July 4 speech. In the speech,  the Nation of Islam leader irefers to Jews as “Satan” who should have their brains knocked out by the “stone of truth.”

Farrakhan’s three-hour rant, titled “The Criterion,” was streamed live on YouTube and has so far garnered over 850,000 views.

In the speech, Farrakhan called the head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Jonathan Greenblatt, “Satan.”

He said, “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.”

“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,” Farrakhan continued.

He also called Jewish legal scholar Alan Dershowitz “a skillful deceiver” and “Satan masquerading as a lawyer.”

Farrakhan repeated the blood libel that Israel was responsible for police brutality against minorities in the US.

“That’s why you gotta come at us like a coward,” he said of the police. “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.”

The Combat Anti-Semitism Movement (CAM) said on Wednesday that Farrakhan’s address was “in clear contravention of YouTube’s own policies on hate speech.”

It called on YouTube to immediately remove the video, and also asked the public to help by submitting a report from the video’s page and contacting Matt Halprin, YouTube’s vice president of global trust and safety.

CAM also posted a template for a protest letter on its website.

CAM Director Sacha Roytman-Dratwa stated, “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.”

By turning a blind eye to Louis Farrakhan’s hateful comments, YouTube is allowing him to hijack the worthy cause of racial justice and use the video sharing site as a platform for anti-Semitism, Roytman-Dratwa said.

He added, “YouTube’s failure to acknowledge and rectify this also enables celebrities and other figures with large social media followings to promote Farrakhan and his anti-Semitic sentiments.”

“We call upon anyone who cares about removing hatred and discrimination from our world, to take part in this campaign and ensure that YouTube does the right thing by removing Farrakhan’s naked incitement against Jews,” Roytman-Dratwa concluded.

A group of Republican Jewish lawmakers have asked seven Democrats who have close ties to Farrakhan to step down.

The lobbying group in March called for the following lawmakers to step down: Reps. Keith Ellison, D-Minn.; Barbara Lee, D-Calif.; Maxine Waters, D-Calif.; Danny Davis, D-Ill.; Andre Carson, D-Ind.; Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y.; and Al Green, D-Texas.

Other high ranking Democrats have often shared the stage with Farrakhan.

–The Algemeiner News Service

X
X