Audio By Carbonatix
In Part I of this article, I discussed two telling statements made by Congressman-elect Allen West during his campaign to represent Florida’s 22nd District. The first revealed West’s troubling inability to differentiate friendly, charitably minded American Muslims from jihadists; the second revealed West’s feelings for his ideological opponents, with whom he may have some difficulty compromising during his term in office. Things get weirder below, where West defends the biblical rationale for slavery.
Shem, Japheth, Ham, and Racism
Much
attention has been paid in the media to Allen West’s mistrust of
Muslims in general, but very little has been said about the
origins of that mistrust and of West’s disdain for Palestinians in
particular. Which is too bad. The roots of West’s animus are explained
in some detail on his campaign site, and they are bizarre. “I do not
support the creation of a Palestinian state…,” West writes. “I do
not support any division of Jerusalem. If I recall from history and the
Old Testament, David, Son of Israel built Jerusalem and his son Solomon
made it great. The muslim [sic] claims to Jerusalem are built upon a very contentious story concocted by muhammad [sic], and of course the latter conquering of the city, even by Salahaddin.”
Supposing
the Bible is a trustworthy historical record, which it isn’t, and even
supposing it is morally acceptable to eject a family from its home
because of a region’s historic religious allegiance, which it isn’t,
West is setting an impractically high standard for historical justice.
So high, in fact, that it invalidates West’s election to Congress —
because, by that standard, Florida’s 22nd District is already spoken for
by animistic, pantheistic Native Americans. And if West’s feelings
toward the Ais, Mayaimi, and Tequesta Indians are less tender than his
feelings toward Israeli Jews, we ought to know why.
West continues:
Genesis
Chapter 16, verses 11-12 states, ‘And the Angel of the Lord said to her
(Hagar): Behold you are with child, and you shall bear a son, and you
shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has heard your affliction.
He shall be a wild man; His hand shall be against everyman, and every
man’s hand against him. And he shall dwell in the presence of all his
brethren.’Ishmael of course became the beginning of the Arab people, and God’s word is immutable truth.
Jewish
and Christian readers will recall that Hagar was the handmaiden of
Sarai, wife of Abraham, who was “given to” Abraham by Sarai because
Sarai could not conceive. Hagar was, in other words, a slave. That West,
an intelligent black man, would use such a passage to argue for the
marginalization of Arabic peoples betrays either a surprising ignorance
of history or else a troubling immunity to facts.
West’s
rationalization relies upon a literal belief in the Great Flood, in the
time of Noah. According to the Bible, Noah’s sons, Shem, Japheth, and
Ham, repopulated the Earth when the waters receded. Unless West is
kidding in the above quote, it is plain that he clings to the
once-popular notion that each of Noah’s sons spawned one of the three
basic “races” of humanity. Shem’s children became the Jews, Arabs, and
other Middle Eastern ethnicities; Japheth’s children became the
Indo-Europeans; and the children of Ham became black Africans, afflicted
with the “curse of Ham.” Abraham and Sarai were descendants of Shem —
“Shemites” or “Semites.” Poor Hagar, the raped handmaiden, was a
Canaanite — a descendant of Ham. Black, in other words.
So the
story of Hagar and her cursed son, Ishmael, is a warning against the
mixing of races. As such, it has been a keystone of racist and
pro-slavery arguments for centuries. In Pictures of Slavery and Anti-Slavery: Advantages of Negro Slavery and the Benefits of Negro Freedom, pro-slavery polemicist John Bell Robinson cites the same
passage as proof-positive of the Bible’s veracity and pro-slavery tenor.
“If slavery was a sin against God,” he wrote, “was this not a good time
to make it known?
Here was a messenger directly
from the throne of the eternal God; yet he utters not one word against
the institution of slavery, but tells Hagar to return to her mistress,
and to submit herself under her hands… It has now been thirty-seven
hundred and seventy years since the angel talked with Hagar as above;
and from thence unto the present day, the descendants of Ishmael have
been against every man, and every man has been against them… They are
universally thieves, robbers, and and murderers; after committing their
depredation, they can retire into the desert with such precipitancy
that they cannot be caught… The Abysynnians, Persians, Egyptians, and
Turks have endeavored to subjugate those Bedouin Arabs… but
ultimately all was abortive… [the Arabs] remain as living monuments
to the truth of the Holy Scriptures, and of the disapprobation of God to
any mixture of blood with the descendants of Canaan.
If
West truly believes that “Ishmael is the beginning of the Arab
peoples” and if he believes that “God’s word is immutable truth,” then
he believes that the Arabs are cursed because they are mulattos. Which
may explain his intense dislike of Barack Obama.
Of course,
Ishmael is not “the beginning” of the Arab people, any more than Noah’s
son, Ham, fathered all black Africans. When Noah allegedly built his
Ark, Africa was already inhabited. And though the population of Africa
has known more than its share of trials — many of them due to the
divinely mandated racism of West’s Bible — a cataclysmic global flood
was not one of them. Black Africa didn’t hear about West’s god until
much, much later.
Right and Wrong Americans
Human
craziness knows no bounds, but I cannot quite bring myself to believe
that Allen West hates mulattos. Nor do I think he really considers
himself a descendant of Ham. Normal people rejected or forgot about the
racialist interpretations of the Old Testament a century ago.
But
the story of Hagar is a useful metaphor, for those who like biblical
metaphors. As West must. He is a devout Christian, after all — which is why it’s
interesting to consider that, of the nearly 800,000 words in the Bible,
the ones he elected to quote on his website focus not on charity, divine
love, stewardship of the Earth, or the brotherhood of man but on a
generational curse imposed upon an infant because his enslaved mother
was stupid enough to be raped by a Shemite. I’m sure West’s editorial
selection in no way represents the depth and breadth of his
theology. But it certainly speaks to his enthusiasms.
Those
enthusiasms are moralist and martial. Last night’s docile performance
on Fox notwithstanding, West has not been shy about his feelings for
those with whom he disagrees. He hates them — “them” including, inevitably, the 41 percent of voters
in his own district who cast their votes for Ron Klein — and he is not afraid to blur a fact, distort a history, or conjure a strawman to elicit a similar antipathy among his fans.
As
West has made abundantly clear, he believes there are right and wrong
kinds of Americans, and the mark of that
righteousness is neither citizenship nor patriotism but the approval
of Allen West and those who love him. In his Jupiter address, West
discussed the inhabitants of Islamberg village in the same breath as
illegal immigrants because, like
Mexicans, these New Yorkers have no place in Allen West’s America, where
every disagreement is a
war and complex questions of ethics and governance that have
confounded the thinkers of three millenia are answered in the bluntest
terms of good and
evil.
Citizenship, said West in his Jupiter address, quoting
Teddy Roosevelt, is “predicated upon the person’s becoming in every
facet an American. And nothing but an American.” But what’s an American?
In nearly every speech, in nearly every interview, West offers his definition in the negative. Yes, an American must be a hard worker.
Yes, an American must be independent and brave. Yes, an American must
love her country. But it’s for naught if she’s a Palestinian
sympathizer. She’s not American if she’s also a Muslim. She isn’t American if she’s a liberal or a socialist or an inhabitant of
Massachusetts’ Fourth District. An American cannot have a certain kind of
bumper sticker.
It is unclear whether Allen West has thoroughly
considered the implications of his exclusionary conception of America. He is a student of history but a poor one — doubly so if he
believes that Noah is humanity’s most recent common ancestor. Yet even
if his brief Bible lesson was a fib, West’s knowledge is decidedly piecemeal, and
his conclusions are often laughable. (During his Jupiter speech, West
blamed the fall of Rome on illegal immigrants. It is a heartbreaking
irony that Rome’s fall had far more to do with the Empire’s
post-Constantine intolerance of religious diversity.) He may not realize
that, by labeling every dissenter a traitor, he echoes not his beloved
Founding Fathers but leaders of far grimmer revolutions.
Allen West may mellow. He may not. He may run for president. It is
indisputable, however, that Florida’s 22nd has elected a representative
whose conception of the United States is so small that it cannot even
contain the multitudes of his own district. The United States is vast,
perplexing, containing an infinity of perspectives — far too many for
any politician, or even a poet, to understand. I wish West would read
less Old Testament and more Whitman, Tocqueville, and Wilde. Those
men may not bring him any closer to understanding what America is, but he might at least learn that he’ll never be wise enough to know for
sure.
