The Democrats pick a man with many things to explain

Kevin Williamson:

A Problem Like Keith Ellison

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Ellison has long been a vocal defender of the so-called Nation of Islam, the bow-tie gang founded by Elijah Muhammad whose relationship to orthodox Islam is approximately that of a UFO cult to the Anglican communion. The NOI and its charismatic leader, the former calypso musician Louis Farrakhan, is an explicitly racist organization, holding as a matter of doctrine that the white race is the result of a doomed mad-science experiment conducted by the biblical Jacob while he was living on the isle of Patmos. Farrakhan is a true religious entrepreneur who has attempted to graft L. Ron Hubbard’s fanciful “Dianetics” onto his own cracked version of Islam, but he has mostly relied on a very old and reliable tradition: Jew-hating.

Farrakhan’s history of vicious anti-Semitism was already well established when Ellison was helping him organize the Million Man March. The Democratic representative says that he rejects anti-Semitism, but he has a long history of sticking up for Jew-hating weirdos, and not only Farrakhan. When Kwame Ture — you may remember him as Stokely Carmichael — claimed that Jews had collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust as a pretext for establishing the state of Israel, Ellison was there to defend him from criticism. When the head of a Minneapolis political group declared that the allegations of anti-Semitism against Farrakhan were made up and insisted that the real problem is racist Jews, Ellison said: “She is correct.” He is a defender of the terrorist Sara Jane Olson and the murderer Assata Shakur and the Islamic terrorist Sami al-Arian. He is a longtime admirer of the murderous dictator Fidel Castro.

Ellison has said that he has since “rejected” the Nation of Islam and its anti-Semitism, and that his involvement with Farrakhan was simply an exercise in community organizing, i.e. the usual liberals-in-a-hurry bull. Ellison is invoking the unwritten Robert Byrd Rule: Democrats get a pass on associating with crackpot racist cults if they vote the right way on the minimum wage.

If he has outgrown Farrakhan, then hurray for him. More joy in Heaven and all that. Ellison’s real problem may not be his association with Louis Farrakhan’s unorthodox Islam but with the Muslim Brotherhood’s very orthodox version.
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There is much more and it is worth reading in full.  Ellison seems to have an affinity for crackpot organizations that express his inner radical.  It is not surprising that he finds a home in the modern Democrat party.  What is only mildly surprising is that they would embrace a man with such a flawed passion for Islamic hate groups.