The Final Call | Perspectives

When Sandy Struck New York Did Allah (God) Target Jews for Black Slavery?

By Tingba Muhammad -Guest Columnist- | Last updated: Nov 19, 2012 - 12:16:39 PM

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Veteran meteorologists stood aghast as Sandy, the largest storm ever recorded, thundered northward from the Caribbean as hurricanes customarily do, but then, taking a sharply western course, it flattened the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The storm pounded the East Coast, killing at least 117, causing an estimated $33 billion in property damage, and cutting power to over eight million.

Jews, who believe themselves to be God’s Chosen People, took special notice of how Hurricane Sandy affected their communities, which for centuries have been highly concentrated in the most expensive shoreline real estate, including the notorious business district known as Wall Street. The headline in the Jewish Forward newspaper was chilling: “Jewish Enclave Devastated by Sandy’s Wrath: Historic Storm Leaves Brooklyn’s Sea Gate On Its Knees.” Their report was apocalyptic: “The streets were covered in sand, blown in by the storm. Residents walked around in a daze, stunned by the historic disaster.” The Jewish Press quotes Rabbi Akiva Eisenstadt: “It’s like a war zone,” he said, surveying the damage in Manhattan Beach. “It’s beyond anything anyone has ever seen.”

Rabbi Noson Leiter declared, “Not just the bad people but the good people have to learn that the Lord does watch what we do, and if we don’t face up, he will deliver divine justice.”

As a second snow, wind, and ice storm targeted the area, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie alluded to the biblical scale of the destruction: “I’m waiting for the locusts and pestilence next.”

He was not far off. The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that America’s enslavement and “evil mistreatment” of the Black man are similar to ancient Babylon’s enslavement and mistreatment of the Jews. “It took the hand of God,” he wrote, “to bring the king of Babylon and his people into submission to the power of God.” And the weapons that God used were the forces of nature—“rain, hail, snow, and earthquakes.” He continued, the moon, “which looks harmless,” would act in concert with these forces. And we see that Sandy’s destruction was made particularly acute by the moon-induced high tide.

Hurricane Sandy was an unprecedented event that even American insurance companies call an “Act of God,” an act that seemed to target His “Chosen People.” Amidst the devastation Jewish leaders sought divine explanations. Rabbi Noson Leiter declared, “Not just the bad people but the good people have to learn that the Lord does watch what we do, and if we don’t face up, he will deliver divine justice.” Whilst he blamed homosexuality for the storm, another rabbi, Amnon Yitzhak, explained that the State of Israel’s dependence on the United States was the root cause of Hurricane Sandy. Both rabbis are saying that Sandy’s devastation was intelligently directed and that it represents divine intervention in America’s affairs.

Those who are guided by the words of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad begin their search for answers where he promised they would be—in the history of America’s mistreatment of the Black man and her continued persecution of the REAL Children of Israel.

The fact is that from the earliest times the area targeted by Hurricane Sandy was the scene of some of the most racist acts in all of American history. The Lower Manhattan site of Wall Street, the financial center of the world, was once a notorious slave market. After stealing the land of the Indians, Dutch Whites forced their enslaved Blacks to clear the dense underbrush and erect a wall that stretched 2,340 feet around the settlement.

A slave market was established in 1711, to be a “place where Negroes and Indians could be bought, sold, or hired.” A White historian described the scene 301 years before Sandy: “Buyers—farmers from Long Island or, perhaps, the foremen of well-to-do plantations—wandered through the crowds looking over the coal black newcomers from Africa, who were standing bewildered and dejected on the auction blocks. From the waterfront drifted the noises of sloops unloading—the chants of negro stevedores, the rumble of molasses kegs rolling down a gangplank, a sailor’s fight before a tavern … . In such an atmosphere the Africans found their new masters.”

But what does this ancient New York history have to do with Jews? Documents revealed by the Nation of Islam researchers show that the first Black slaves in New York came by way of Jewish merchants.

In 1647, the desperate labor-starved Whites of the colony of New York turned to Jewish merchants of Brazil to supply them, even though the colony’s leaders complained that the Jews charged much too high interest. Brazil was then the largest slave market in the world, and Jewish sellers and buyers dominated it. In fact, on Jewish holidays, the slave markets actually had to shut down for lack of business! As far away as New York it was known that if they needed Black slaves, the “Hebrews”—God’s so-called Chosen People—held a near monopoly of the slave trade.

Later, in the early 1700s, two Jewish-owned ships came directly from the African coast and sailed into New York harbor. And according to Jewish scholars quoted in The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One, they were “two of the largest slave cargoes to be brought into New York in the first half of the eighteenth century.”

New Jersey was also hit hard by Sandy, and that state’s racial history is similarly atrocious. When Indians challenged slavery in the state’s high court in 1797, the Chief Justice wrote that “Native Americans have been so long recognized as slaves in our law ... that to free [them] would violate a long-standing principle which protected property rights in the state.”

More Blacks were put to death during the colonial period in New York than in any other northern colony, and New Jersey was a close second. Horrific acts of White barbarism, such as the posting of the severed heads of Blacks on wooden stakes, were common. The smell of Blacks being burned alive seemed to delight early White New Yorkers, who gathered for the events with much anticipation. One witness describes how a runaway was chained to a stake with firewood thrown around him: “If the torture was to be prolonged then green wood was used.” The same writer explained, “It was not unusual to hang up negroes in a wooden frame so that they might die of starvation and their carcasses be devoured by birds of prey.”

Sandy hit Connecticut which also had slaves, but its forte was Indian murder. In 1636, the Connecticut militia trapped some 700 Pequot Indian men, women, and children near the mouth of the Mystic River, and burned them alive: “To see [the Indians] frying in the fire, and the streams of their blood quenching the same, and the stench was horrible; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice.”

When it came to the abolition of slavery—forget New York. In 1860, New York City Mayor Fernando Wood said the profits, the luxuries, the necessities, and even the physical existence of New York “depend upon the products … of slave labor and the prosperity of the slave master.” The city’s top rabbi, Morris Raphall, was in total agreement, adding that God Himself sanctioned slavery! When the nation erupted in civil war, the popular mayor called for the city to secede to join the South. He reassured the Confederacy that New York still welcomed—with open arms—trade with the South. The New York Jewish banker August Belmont (for whom the horse race Belmont Stakes is named) financed and ran the presidential campaign of Lincoln’s pro-slavery opponent, Stephen A. Douglas. Jewish bankers in the financial districts of New York like the Lehman Brothers could be found financing the cotton trade, slavery, and the Confederacy.

And nowhere in America did so many White men rise up in opposition to President Lincoln. For four bloody days 70,000 treasonous Whites in New York City destroyed stores, burned the homes of abolitionists, and randomly lynched Blacks. When the smoke cleared, as many as 2,000 people were dead and 8,000 wounded. More than 100 buildings were burned down, and about 200 others were damaged and looted. The bodies were reportedly gathered and secretly buried on Staten Island.

The fact is that if founding father Thomas Jefferson is correct—“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever”—and Elijah Muhammad is correct that the judgment of America “is due to the way that she has treated the so-called Negroes (Black people of America) for four hundred years,” there was probably no more an historic target for this historic storm than where it hit America.

(Tingba Muhammad is a citizen of the Nation of Islam.)