It looks like Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, long a puppet of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, finally has hit the Price wall. Jenkins has stopped action on the appointment of Price protégé Aaron McCarthy, aka Aaron Michaels, to the county's "homeland security advisory committee," whatever the hell that's supposed to be.
There is a Price wall. The most prominent marker for that wall is his sympathy for, consorting with and relentless promotion over decades of McCarthy, who is a founder of one of the nation's most virulently anti-Semitic hate groups, the so-called "New Black Panthers."
In 1990 Michaels, then a producer of a radio show for Price, helped found the group to take on school board issues in the city. The group was sued successfully by the original Black Panthers, who denounced it as a racist hate group and insisted it stop using the name, but a ruling in the plaintiffs' behalf has never been enforced.
Since its founding, the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) has spread into an organization with international chapters. One of its core tenets is that Jews are not Jews -- that the "real" Jews of the Bible are black people, who are God's "real" chosen people.
I have always kicked myself for not getting more of this stuff into print years ago when I first heard it from Commissioner Price himself. I didn't know what to make of it at the time and may have stupidly dismissed it as mere eccentricity born of a lack of formal education.
That's not what it is. It is evil, pure and simple. It is the evil that for 2,000 years has writhed out of the earth in pogroms and concentration camps. In its seed it bears the potential for metastasis into a global hatred for humanity itself -- for you, me, everybody, including black people in the end, because in the end hatred of humanity must hate all of humanity.
I hate reprinting some of what follows below. The words themselves are vile. But we need to know exactly what this group, long supported by Price, really believes and preaches. These quotes are taken from the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, the nation's most respected and quoted watchdog of hate groups.
NBPP leader Khalid Abdul Muhammad, speaking at a protest in Baltimore, Maryland, February 19, 1994: "Our lessons talk about the bloodsuckers of the poor. ... It's that old no-good Jew, that old imposter Jew, that old hooked-nose, bagel-eating, lox-eating, Johnny-come-lately, perpetrating-a-fraud, just-crawled-out-of-the-caves-and-hills-of-Europe, so-called damn Jew ... and I feel everything I'm saying up here is kosher."
Malik Zulu Shabazz, the party's national chairman, protesting at B'nai B'rith International headquarters in Washington, D.C., April 20, 2002: "Kill every goddamn Zionist in Israel! Goddamn little babies, goddamn old ladies! Blow up Zionist supermarkets!"
King Samir Shabazz, head of the party's Philadelphia chapter, in a National Geographic documentary, January 2009: "I hate white people. All of them. Every last iota of a cracker, I hate it. We didn't come out here to play today. There's too much serious business going on in the black community to be out here sliding through South Street with white, dirty, cracker whore bitches on our arms, and we call ourselves black men. ... What the hell is wrong with you black man? You at a doomsday with a white girl on your damn arm. We keep begging white people for freedom! No wonder we not free! Your enemy cannot make you free, fool! You want freedom? You going to have to kill some crackers! You going to have to kill some of their babies!"
I spoke to Price about this in the late 1980s when I was a member of the Dallas Times Herald editorial board. The paper had received complaints, not about Price but about other black activists in Dallas who were urging the city to force its pension funds to disinvest from South African companies. We were provided evidence that some speeches being made at Dallas City Hall by the activists contained passages plagiarized from the war-time anti-Semitic writings of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda from 1933 to the end of World War II.
I talked about it with Price. I was working on a book about the political and racial history of Dallas at the time. It was in that conversation he told me that "we don't know who the real Jews are."
I asked him where he thought the people most of us have always known as the Jews came from. He made a veiled reference to the 1960s book Chariots of the Gods, which promulgated a wacko theory about everybody in the Bible having come here in spaceships from another planet. He was not kidding.
I told him that in my research I was dealing with all sorts of instances in which prominent Jews in Dallas had stepped up and championed the cause of African-Americans long before the full advent of the Civil Rights Movement, at a time when speaking in defense of black people in Dallas was risky. I said I understood how black people could resent, even hate the whites who carried out slavery and Jim Crow, but I just didn't get the anti-Semitism.
He asked me what time period I was talking about. I said I was speaking of the late 1950s. He said that he would have been only 8 or 9 years old then. He said, "How am I supposed to know about anything like that?"
How, indeed? I guess you'd have to read something other than Chariots of the Gods.
Look, I said I kick myself for not having outted more of this sooner. And I do. I don't feel like a hero here. But I also can't avoid suggesting that Judge Jenkins could do the entire community a major solid by simply asking Commissioner Price and McCarthy-Michaels to expound on some of these matters in public and on the record.
Let's get it out. Let's get it all out.
