- Racist and anti-Semite
- Leader of New Black Panther Party
Born Paris Lewis in about 1970, Malik Zulu Shabazz has become an increasingly well-known figure in radical Black Muslim politics since the mid-1990s. He currently heads the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), whose twin hallmarks are anti-white and anti-Semitic hatred. A practicing attorney and a frequent speaker on college campuses, Shabazz earned a bachelor's degree from Howard University and a J.D. from Howard University Law School. During his undergraduate college years, he was an aggressive campus organizer; in 1988 he founded Unity Nation, a self-described "black revolutionary" student group.
In the 1990s, Shabazz's militant temperament caught the eye of Khalid Abdul Muhammad, protégé of Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan; Muhammad called the young Shabazz "one of the greatest student leaders of all time." Notorious for his venomous anti-white and anti-Jewish rhetoric, Muhammad would soon become Shabazz's revered mentor who, according to Shabazz, "helped to shape my life and was a captain and minister over me."
The other major influence on Shabazz's intellectual development was Louis Farrakhan. "I met Minister Louis Farrakhan on my college campus and it absolutely changed my life," says Shabazz.
Like his mentors, Shabazz is a racial separatist. "The perfect world for us [blacks] would be … a nation of our own," he says. "… It seems almost impossible to achieve real justice within the confines of White racist America."
After graduating from law school and passing the bar exam, Shabazz worked as a campaign aide and spokesman for Marion Barry, the scandal-plagued, three-term mayor of Washington, DC. During that same period, Shabazz became a member of the rap music group The Defiant Giants; he took the stage name "Zulu King Paris" and helped record the album Rise, Black Man, Rise.
Soon thereafter, Shabazz became a member of NOI. In 1995 he helped organize Farrakhan's October 16th "Million Man March" in Washington, DC. The day before the rally, Shabazz emceed a local "Black African Holocaust Nationhood Conference," where he declared: "America should be glad that every black man is not on a killing spree for all the suffering they [white Americans] have done."
In 1997 Shabazz followed his mentor Khalid Abdul Muhammad into the NBPP, quickly becoming the party's National Attorney and National Spokesman.
In 1998 Shabazz was named "Young Lawyer of the Year" by the National Bar Association. That same year, he ran unsuccessfully for the Washington, DC city council, garnering just 8 percent of the vote. That same year, Shabazz co-organized (with Khalid Abdul Muhammad) an NBPP-sponsored "Million Youth March" in Harlem, New York, which drew only a sparse crowd (about 6,000) and ended in clashes between the attendees and city police. Just prior to that event, Shabazz had threatened to kill any officers who might be tempted to "interfere" with the proceedings. In his address to the marchers, Shabazz said: "The only solution any time there is a funeral in the black community, is a funeral in the police community."
At Al Sharpton's "Redeem the Dream" rally at the Lincoln Memorial in August 2000, Shabazz was a featured speaker and delivered what he titled his "I Have a Black Dream" speech, which specifically called for a race war in America. "For every casket and funeral in our community," he declared, "there should be a casket and funeral in the enemy's community."
In October 2000, Richard J. Rosendall, an openly gay writer and the former president of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, DC, sent Shabazz an email needling him about his poor showing as a candidate in the aforementioned 1998 city council election in DC. Shabazz’s response to Rosendall contained the following sentiments, all in capital letters: "LEAVE ME ALONE SICK LITTLE FAGGOT. …YOU WILL GET CRUSHED, LITTLE DEVIL …"
When Khalid Abdul Muhammad died unexpectedly in February 2001, Shabazz was disconsolate. "I was beyond hurt,” said Shabazz. “I was devastated. I was crushed. … He was so strong. He was so beautiful. He was so brilliant.”
With Muhammad gone, Shabazz took the reins of NBPP and relocated the organization's headquarters from New York to Washington, DC. Soon thereafter, he organized a boycott against a local Korean-American-owned store after a dispute between the merchant and a black teenage girl. The demonstrators chanted, "Death to the Bloodsucker." The store was eventually firebombed, though Shabazz and NBPP claimed no connection to that incident.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Shabazz defended Osama bin Laden and blamed President George W. Bush for the horrors of that day. During an NBPP meeting on March 22, 2002 -- six months after 9/11 -- Shabazz held up picture of bin Laden and praised him as a Muslim "brother" and "a bold man" who was "not bowing down" to the West, but rather was "standing up" for his beliefs and "bringing reform to this world." Shabazz reasoned that because bin Laden had caused both President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to be "shaking and quaking," the al Qaeda leader "got to be some kind of friend of yours and mine." Urging his listeners to "give [bin Laden] his respect," Shabazz said: "Let's give him a hand, man." His listeners responded with enthusiastic applause.
At a pro-reparations rally in 2002, Shabazz blustered, "The President wants to talk about a terrorist named bin Laden. … The real terrorists have always been the United Snakes of America." On a number of occasions, Shabazz has intimated that Jewish conspirators possessed exclusive foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and saved their own lives that day by not going to their jobs in the World Trade Center.
Shabazz regularly trumpets his outrage over the alleged epidemic of white-on-black violence in the United States. "If any racist, straw-chewin', tobacco-chewin' racist redneck lays their hand on any black man or woman in this county," he said at an April 2001 news conference in Bowie, Maryland, "crush that devil that is trying to do you harm and to do you evil in the name of God and in accordance with your legal rights."
Shabazz believes that all black prisoners in the United States should be set free, on grounds that they could not possibly have been tried fairly by the racist criminal-justice system of a racist nation. In 2002 he expressed his solidarity with then-murder suspect Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who was ultimately convicted of killing a black sheriff's deputy in Georgia. Shabazz is also a devoted supporter of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal. In 2003 Shabazz created Black Lawyers for Justice, an organization promoting the notion that black inmates have been unjustly railroaded into their prison cells.
Shabazz reserves perhaps his largest measure of contempt for Jews. "I say to all Jewish people and all white people," he told a Howard University audience in April 1994 "… stop pushing your Holocaust down my throat, when the black holocaust is the worst holocaust humanity has ever seen." Five months later at the same school, Shabazz warned: "We will never bow down to the white, Jewish, Zionist onslaught."
Regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East, Shabazz has said: "The New Black Panther Party stands in 100 percent solidarity with the Palestinian people. As you know, we're strong opponents of Zionism. We're strong opponents of the U.S. policy of strictly supporting Israel. We find no legal or legitimate basis, really for the existence of the Zionist state. … I say to the Palestinian people to continue to stand up and continue to resist and never forget the blood of the martyrs that went before them.” At an April 2002 protest outside B'nai B'rith headquarters in Washington, DC, Shabazz said: "Kill every goddamn Zionist in Israel! Goddamn little babies, goddamn old ladies! Blow up Zionist supermarkets!"
Shabazz reads American history as an unpunctuated narrative of white-perpetrated racism and oppression, a reality he says the schools are afraid to teach. For example, he asserts that George Washington was little more than a slave owner who “raped black women.” “Ol' Thomas Jefferson,” adds Shabazz, “old wooden-teeth-wearin', wig-wearin' Thomas Jefferson, [was] nothin' but a slave-master, a slave-owner, an Indian-killer. Andrew Jackson! Indian killers, slave traders, slave owners!”
In Shabazz’s calculus, not much has changed in more recent centuries. He asserts that white people continue to "get joy out of either physically hanging you [blacks], or they get joy out of mentally and politically hanging you.” In short, Shabazz considers white racism to be modern America's defining, ever-enduring attribute.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans in September 2005, Shabazz visited that city and reported that "[w]holesale police brutality is being waged against the [mostly black] victims of this natural disaster." He charged that police sniper units were trying to provoke black residents into behaviors that could justify "opening fire on groups of black males randomly and indiscriminately." "[T]his is more of a racist occupation of subjugation rather than a relief effort," said Shabazz.
Shortly after Election Day of 2008, Shabazz became the subject of controversy when it was revealed that he had dispatched two members of his NBPP to stand outside an open polling station in Philadelphia and intimidate white voters with racial slurs and threats of violence. Shabazz instructed the men (one of whom was armed with a nightstick) to "use all means at your dispoal" to "stop angry whites" from voting against Barack Obama. On January 7, 2009, the Justice Department under President Bush filed criminal charges against Shabazz and the two men for violating the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The failure of all three Panthers to appear in court led to an order by U.S. District Judge Stewart Dalzell to seek judgments or sanctions against them. In May 2009, however, the Justice Department -- now under President Obama -- dismissed the case. |