KEITH ELLISON FOR DUMMIES - A congressman rewrites his own history.

THE ELLISON ELISION, CONT’D

Minnesota Fifth District Rep. is an old-time race hustler straight out of the Nation of Islam. He was a self-identified member of the Nation of Islam as recently as his first run for office in 1998. I wrote about his extensive and thoroughly discreditable race hustling background in the Weekly Standard article “Louis Farrakhan’s first congressman.” I posted copies of some key sources in “Keith Ellison for dummies.”

Ellison shuns candor in discussing his background. He whitewashes it. In his recently published memoir, he not only omits his background as a race hustler and advocate of the Nation of Islam, he presents himself as a critic of the Nation. I added back some of what he has left out over the years in the Weekly Standard article “The Ellison elision and in the Star Tribune column “Ellison remembers to forget.”

Minneapolis is of course a Democratic preserve. It is now convulsed in one aspect of the civil war on the left that Steve Hayward has documented at length here. But for my interest in Ellison this would be part 25 of the series Steve has so nobly advanced. The police shooting of Jamar Clark has pitted the Democratic mayor and police chief against disruptive Black Lives Matter protesters and others at the Fourth Precinct and elsewhere around the city.

Ellison has now entered the fray as a power broker. The Star Tribune reports on Ellison’s contribution to the political fallout in Ricardo Lopez’s “U.S. Rep. Ellison emerges as key political leader amid Jamar Clark protests.” Let me simply note that it is the kind of puff piece to which Ellison has grown accustomed in the course of his service in office and that it is simply nauseating in light of Ellison’s history in Minneapolis.

__________________________________________________________________

A congressman rewrites his own history. 

Minnesota’s Keith Ellison made history as the first Muslim elected to Congress. He is a former member and local leader of the Nation of Islam who first ran for office as a Democrat in 1998 under the pseudonym Keith Ellison-Muhammad. He’s a voluble striver and a hustler emitting Marxist claptrap with an Islamic twist. He now puts these qualities on display in his engaging new memoir-cum-manifesto, My Country, ’Tis of Thee: My Faith, My Family, Our Future (Karen Hunter Publishing/Gallery Books, $25.00).  

The real drama in the book plays out under the surface, out of the reader’s view. Ellison baldly revises his life to remove his most dramatic transformation, from a local leader and advocate of the Nation of Islam to a relentless critic of it (as he appears in the book, as though it were ever thus). Moreover, Ellison’s political manifesto has all the charms of a compilation of New York Times editorials. If you want to understand where the Democratic party is headed, however, Ellison’s manifesto warrants a look all by itself. Holding positions of leadership in the Congressional Progressive Caucus (he is co-chair) and in the House Democratic Caucus (he is chief deputy whip), Ellison embodies the strange alliance of radical Islam and the American left.

Fortunately, the book is not all politics. It comes to life when Ellison turns to his family background and his conversion to Islam. The third of five brothers, Ellison was born and raised in a relatively affluent family on the northwest side of Detroit. He radiates justified pride in his family. His parents raised no losers. Of the five brothers, Ellison relates that four have law degrees and one is a doctor. “My parents are five for five: all of their sons have graduate degrees and are gainfully employed,” he says.  

His father, a hardworking psychiatrist, comes across as a dour skeptic in matters religious (he “had had no time for religion”). Ellison describes his father as “less than pleased” when his next-oldest brother, Brian, announced at age 18 that he’d found Jesus (Brian not only attended law school, he went on to become a Baptist minister). Ellison’s mother is a faithful (“Mass-attending, candle-lighting, genuflecting, rosary-bead-praying”) Catholic, and she seems to have prevailed in Ellison’s education, if not in his attitude. Attending high school at the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy, Ellison never felt the attractions of the faith. “The religion never spoke to me,” he says. 

Ellison discovered Islam as a 19-year-old college student attending Wayne State University in Detroit. Accompanying a college friend to Jummah prayer at the student center, Ellison found a Muslim preacher talking “about universal brotherhood, the evils of racism and the common origins of all of humanity.” He liked what he heard, and he converted to Islam later that year.

What kind of Muslim is he? Ellison expressly addresses the question. He depicts himself as a live-and-let-live kind of Muslim. “If I were Jewish, I would probably be a reform Jew. If I were Christian, I would be one of those come-as-you-are nondenominational Christians,” he confides. “Faith is not about expressing what I believe so that the world can see I’m faithful. I don’t believe in following a strict set of rules to prove my love for God or to prove my faith.” According to Ellison, “In Islam, your religion is what you make of it.” 

As for the vexed question of gay marriage, Ellison concedes that “I get Muslims who come up to me and ask, ‘Brother Keith, how can you be in favor of gay marriage?’ ” Brother Keith explains: “I’m in favor of civil rights for all. I’m in favor of freedom.” 

Those of us wondering about the reconciliation of his faith with his politics now have the answer. Which branch of Islam comports with the agenda of the Democratic party on social issues? Ellison reveals it to be the Ellison branch of Islam. 

With one mystery solved, Ellison silently introduces another. How does his adherence to Islam square with his long involvement with the Nation of Islam? After graduation from Wayne State, Ellison moved to Minneapolis to attend the University of Minnesota Law School. As a third-year law student, writing under the name Keith E. Hakim, Ellison took up the cause of “Minister Louis Farrakhan” and the Nation of Islam in the Minnesota Daily. 

Making a name for himself in Minneapolis as an attorney activist in the 1990s, Ellison emerged as a local leader of the Nation of Islam under the names Keith X Ellison and Keith Ellison-Muhammad. He first ran, unsuccessfully, for public office seeking the DFL (Democratic) endorsement for state representative as Keith Ellison-Muhammad, a self-identified member of the Nation of Islam. On the threshold of Ellison’s election to Congress, I wrote about his record of support for the Nation of Islam in the article “Louis Farrakhan’s First Congressman” (The Weekly Standard, October 9, 2006).

Ellison was still toeing the Nation of Islam line in February 2000, this time in a speech at a local National Lawyers Guild meeting in support of Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson (formerly Kathleen Soliah), who had recently been apprehended at her home in St. Paul. In the course of remarks supporting Soliah/Olson, Ellison complained about the charges previously brought against “Qubiliah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X, in retribution against Minister Farrakhan,” by the Office of the United States Attorney in Minneapolis. 

By the time Ellison was elected a Minnesota state representative in 2002, he had shed his pseudonyms and his affiliation with the Nation of Islam. In May 2006, when he secured the endorsement of the Fifth District DFL convention, Ellison’s long public record as a leader of, and apologist for, Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam created a problem for him. In the context of a competitive Democratic primary the following September, Ellison’s past threatened to undermine his support from segments of the Democratic base including, but not limited to, the district’s Jewish community. 

Writing about Ellison on the blog Power Line during the spring and summer of 2006, I discovered this personally when prominent local Democrats sought me out to share information about Ellison’s background. They were not pleased by the prospect of a former local leader of the Nation of Islam serving as the face of the Democratic party in Minneapolis, or by the failure of Minneapolis’s Star Tribune to retrieve information in its own archives for a glimpse of Ellison’s
public doings on behalf of the Nation of Islam.

Ellison dealt with the problem of his past by submitting an extremely misleading letter to the Minnesota chapter of the Jewish Community Relations Council. In the letter Ellison artfully minimized his involvement with the Nation of Islam while he nevertheless acknowledged his role “work[ing] with local members of the Nation of Islam.” In light of his past “connections” to the Nation of Islam, Ellison stated in his 2006 letter: “I have long since distanced myself from and rejected the Nation of Islam due to its propagation of bigoted and anti-Semitic ideas and statements, as well as other issues.” In mitigation he pleaded ignorance, claiming: “I did not adequately scrutinize [their] positions and statements.”

Ellison makes no such acknowledgment or plea in My Country, ’Tis of Thee. Rather, he rewrites history to eliminate his long involvement with Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, dispatching his activities down the memory hole. Looking back on his career in Minnesota, Ellison has erased Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam from the picture. Ellison has expunged his own record. 

Ellison does not simply airbrush the picture. He presents himself as a critic of Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. He writes disparagingly that 

the organization wasn’t set up to take on the establishment. It was designed to avoid racism—not confront it. The NOI preached separation, which was the same message preached by the Ku Klux Klan. .  .  . The NOI posed no threat to the status quo; it posed no threat to the system of racism.

Ellison pours it on, criticizing Farrakhan’s performance at the Million Man March (which Ellison attended) and after: “He could only wax eloquent while scapegoating other groups.”

Ellison goes out of his way to note: “I didn’t come to [Islam] through the Nation of Islam, as some African Americans have done.” Although he must be drawing on his own experience, Ellison conceals the starkly autobiographical element in his observation: “In the NOI, if you’re not angry in opposition to some group of people (whites, Jews, so-called ‘sellout’ blacks), you don’t have religion.” I doubt whether leaving the Nation of Islam has helped Ellison much in the anger management department, but it can’t have hurt.

What’s going on? As he notes in the acknowledgments, Ellison wrote the book with Karen Hunter, of Karen Hunter Publishing, part of the Suitt-Hunter Media Group. Suitt-Hunter “works with celebrities and emerging artists, identifying opportunities to expand the individual’s brand into ancillary markets.” Life as a representative in the House minority doesn’t suit Ellison, and he obviously senses the opportunity to take his radicalism to a mainstream left-wing audience. With a sure feel for the main chance, he finds that his faith provides a means of ascent. 

Ellison begins the book with his attendance at President Obama’s inauguration in 2009. Obama, suffice it to say, seems to have inspired him to certain “dreams” and to an “audacity” that goes well beyond hope.

_________________________________________________________________________________

POSTED ON AUGUST 28, 2011 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN MEDIA BIAS, WHO IS KEITH ELLISON?

KEITH ELLISON FOR DUMMIES

After he unexpectedly won the endorsement of the DFL nominating convention for Minnesota’s Fifth District congressional seat on May 6, 2006, Keith Ellison faced a serious problem. The problem was how to deal with his well-known involvement with the Nation of Islam. Had Ellison not managed to dispose of the problem, his candidacy would likely have been irreparably weakened in the competitive DFL primary field.

Ellison chose to deal with the problem by writing an audacious letter to the Jewish Community Relations Council on May 28, 2006. In the letter, Ellison staked his campaign on three assertions: That his involvement with the Nation of Islam was limited to a period of 18 months around the time of the Million Man March in 1995, that he was unaware of the Nation of Islam’s anti-Semitism and that he terminated his involvement with the Nation of Islam when he became aware of it.

This is Ellison’s May 28 letter; click to enlarge.

Instead of undertaking any investigation of these assertions, the Minneapolis Star Tribune has reported the assertions and repeated them as facts ever since. Yet each of these assertions is demonstrably false. Their falsehood is easily established by newspaper accounts documenting Ellison’s activities, speeches and beliefs over the relevant period of time.

Moreover, Ellison’s long commitment to and advocacy of the Nation of Islam is reflected in the various aliases he used over a period of ten years: Keith Hakim, Keith X Ellison and Keith Ellison-Muhammad. The Star Tribune has not only failed to connect these aliases to Ellison’s involvement with the Nation of Islam, it has erroneously reported that Ellison used these aliases during his student days at the University of Minnesota Law School.

Ellison’s involvement with the Nation of Islam includes his support of “the truth” of Joanne Jackson’s condemnation of Jews in 1997 as “the most racist white people.” In his May 28 letter to the JCRC, Ellison went out of his way to state that, unlike others, he did not come to the defense of the statement that created the controversy that engulfed Joanne Jackson. Rather, according to Ellison, he only called for dialogue. This too is demonstrably false.

Ellison’s involvement with the Nation of Islam is not the most offensive of his public associations and commitments. That distinction must belong to Ellison’s work with Minneapolis gang leader and murderer Sharif Willis following the 1992 murder of Minneapolis Police Officer Jerry Haaf.

Ellison’s February 2000 speech on behalf of domestic terrorist Kathleen Soliah/Sara Jane Olson picked up this reprehensible aspect of Ellison’s career and united it with his missionary work on behalf of the Nation of Islam. In that speech Ellison called for the release of Soliah/Olson and spoke favorably of cop killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur. The Star Tribune has never gotten around to reporting what Ellison said on that occasion either.

My article summarizing the most notable aspects of Keith Ellison’s public career — “Louis Farrakhan’s First Congressman” — was published in the Weekly Standard on September 30, 2006, in anticipation of Ellison’s election. As Power Line readers may have guessed, my preferred title for the article was “Who is Keith Ellison?”

Given the media’s disinclination to examine Ellison’s public record, or to get straight what little it has let come to the surface, we set out a Keith Ellison timeline and posted copies of some key articles as a companion to the Standard piece:

1987–Ellison enrolls in University of Minnesota Law School

1989–Ellison publishes the first of two articles in the University of Minnesota Daily under the alias “Keith Hakim.” In the first such article, Ellison speaks up for the Nation of Islam.

1990–Ellison participates in the sponsorship of the anti-Semitic speech by Kwame Ture given at the University of Minnesota Law School (“Zionism: Imperialism, White Supremacy or Both?”). Ellison rejects the appeal of Jewish law students to withdraw sponsorship of the lecture. Ellison graduates from University of Minnesota Law School.

1992–Ellison appears as speaker at demonstration against Minneapolis police with Vice Lords leader Sharif Willis following the murder of Officer Haaf by four Vice Lords gangsters in September.

1993–Ellison leads demonstration chanting “We don’t get no justice, you don’t get no peace” in support of Vice Lords defendant on trial for the murder of Officer Haaf. Ellison attends Gang Summit in Kansas City with Willis.

1995–Ellison supports Million Man March, appears at organizing rally with former Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Muhammed at University of Minnesota. Ellison acts as local Nation of Islam leader in march at office of U.S. Attorney in Minneapolis protesting indictment of Qubilah Shabazz for conspiring to murder Louis Farrakhan. Ellison charges FBI with conspiring to murder Farrakhan. Ellison writes article under alias “Keith X Ellison” attacking Star Tribune for criticizing Louis Farrakhan. Here it is; click to enlarge:

1997–Ellison appears under alias “Keith Ellison-Muhammad” at Minnesota Initiative Against Racism hearing in support of Joanne Jackson. Ellison defends “the truth” of Jackson’s statement that “Jews are the most racist white people.” This is the Star Tribune’s article on the controversy, which refers to Ellison’s statement:

This is the statement that Ellison read, as described in the Star Tribune article, and published in the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder; click to enlarge:

1998–Ellison first runs for DFL endorsement for state representative. Ellison identifies himself as member of Nation of Islam in Insight News article on his candidacy. Ellison runs for endorsement under alias “Keith Ellison-Muhammad.” This is the Insight News article; click to enlarge:

2000–Ellison gives speech supporting Kathleen Soliah/Sara Jane Olson at National Lawyers Guild fundraiser. Demands Soliah/Olson’s release. Asks audience to recall time when “Qubilah Shabazz was prosecuted in retribution against Minister Farrakhan.” Speaks favorably of cop killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur.

May 2006–Ellison writes letter to JCRC asserting involvement with Nation of Islam limited to 18 months supporting Million Man March.

August 2006–Ellison appears at unpublicizied fundraiser with CAIR executive director and Hamas supporter Nihad Awad among featured guests.

What are we to make of this? Take a look at Ellison’s May 28, 2006, letter to the Jewish Community Relations Council; it served as the keystone of his 2006 campaign for election to Congress. That letter to the contrary notwithstanding, the documents posted above nevertheless by themselves establish that 1) Ellison’s involvement with the Nation of Islam exceeded any 18-month period, 2) Ellison’s involvement with the Nation of Islam extended far beyond the promotion of the Million Man March, and 3) that Ellison himself, far from being ignorant of the Nation of Islam’s anti-Semitism, actively supported it.

The steadfast refusal of the local Minnesota media to examine Ellison’s public record in the course of his congressional campaign represented a striking case of nonfeasance, incompetence and willfully averted eyes that remains a story unto itself.

NOTE: This post is adapted from the post that appeared here on September 30, 2006, as a companion to my Weekly Standard article on Ellison. I have slightly revised and reposted it as a companion to “Faith questions for Keith Ellison.”