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NYC council stuns by naming Harlem street after notorious anti-Semite, socialist Dem doubles down to defend

February 28, 2023 | | Print Article

A New York City council has shockingly voted to name a street in Harlem after anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad who infamously referred to white people as “blue-eyed devils” and advocated for a separate black nation.

Muhammad led the Nation of Islam from 1934 until his death in 1975. Nation of Islam-owned Mosque Temple No. 7 resides on the block where the street intersects. That is the mosque where Malcolm X famously preached before he had a falling out with Muhammed and was eventually assassinated by three members of the Nation of Islam: Mujahid Abdul Halim, Muhammad A. Aziz, and Khalil Islam. That intersection is also where an NYPD officer was killed by unidentified Nation of Islam radicals.

Malcolm X famously accused Muhammad of having children with various teenage assistants. Muhammad was reportedly linked to the assassination of Malcolm X but was never charged. He denied any involvement in the assassination but allegedly said days later that “Malcolm X got just what he preached.”

Muhammad also mentored Louis Farrakhan, the current Nation of Islam leader, who peddles antisemitic rhetoric as well.

The proposal to name the intersection at 127th St. and Malcolm X Boulevard “The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad Way” was one of 129 in a City Hall bill that passed 42-0 this month and is now on its way to Mayor Eric Adams’ desk for signing. The bill contains a list of public sites that will be named after various figures “based on requests of Council Members whose district includes the location.”

Harlem Democratic Socialist Kristin Richardson Jordan, a council member for District 9 in Harlem, is slamming fellow council members for criticizing the move.

“It is actually not OK to erase black leaders who are not pleasing to white people,” she declared during the vote, according to the Daily Mail. “I profoundly vote aye on Elijah Muhammad Way.”

However, not all Democrats see it that way. Democrat council member Robert Holden of Queens asserted that the proposal to honor Elijah Muhammad should be removed from the list.

“I’m going to oppose Elijah Muhammad. He was a black supremacist. He was a bad guy,” Holden pointed out, according to the Daily Mail. “It’s an insult to Malcolm X Boulevard.”

According to the New York Post, Councilman Kalman Yeger (D-Brooklyn) stated that it would be “highly embarrassing for the Council to pass… [the Elijah Muhammad street renaming]. Streets renaming should be reserved for principled and respected individuals.”

“He is not worthy of having a street co-naming in the City of New York, and we should not even be considering this,” Councilman David Carr, a Staten Island Republican, also remarked in a hearing earlier in February.

“He fails every test we could possibly put forward: the test based on the values and views of today, and the values and views of the times in which he lived and worked,” Carr admonished at the Parks and Recreation Committee hearing.

The leftist Southern Poverty Law Center reported, “Early on, Elijah Muhammad preached about greedy Jews and advanced the longstanding anti-Semitic trope that Jews turned Jesus Christ into the authorities.” They have designated the Nation of Islam as a “hate group.”

“Muhammad invited American Nazi Party boss George Lincoln Rockwell to the NOI’s 1962 Saviours’ Day Convention,” where Rockwell dubbed Muhammad “the Adolf Hitler of the black man,” the center added.

Even the non-conservative Anti-Defamation League branded the National of Islam, the largest black nationalist organization in the US, as having a “consistent record of antisemitism and bigotry since its founding in the 1930s.”

“Elijah Muhammad did not create the Nation of Islam but he built it on a number of principles. Among them: Islam is the true religion, ‘knowledge of self’ is vital, ‘doing for self’ is necessary, the black man is supreme and the white man is ‘the devil,'” Muhammad’s obituary reportedly reads.

It should be noted that in 2022, New York City removed a statue of Theodore Roosevelt from outside the American Museum of Natural History because of its depiction of Native American and African figures. In late 2021, New York City also removed a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the City Hall because the third president of the United States had owned slaves.

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