In The Name of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful.

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan The next century is the Century of Peace and it’s the Century of the Indigenous. You’re going to come back to your former glory in the next century, and the land that you will inhabit is already inhabited.

We are young, gifted and we are atoning. We didn’t say “atoned” because that’s the past participle of the verb “to atone,” which means it is an action that started in the past and is completed. But when we say, “atoning,” we are using the present progressive tense; it is an action that is started and is still continuing and will continue into the future until it has been completed.

To be young means to be fresh, new, not yet fully developed. Once you think you’re old, you stop developing; you get set in your ways; you refuse to change. But if you are young, gifted and atoning, you know you haven’t reached it (the goal) yet because when I reach it I will be one with God, sharing His mind, His will, His spirit, therefore, I will never have to lie, steal or cheat.

Jesus said, except you become as a little child you cannot enter the kingdom of God. The Children of Israel were promised the Promised Land, but there were giants on the land and the Children of Israel told God that they were not going into the land until He cleaned the giants out. God said, no, I want you to go in now and inhabit that land even though the giants are there; I want the giants to know that you are the new giants because I am with you. They said, even so, we are not going.

Now that’s old, isn’t it? Here is God telling you, old man, I’m going in with you. Here is The Eternal God; ever young, wanting to go in with old folk and the old folk do not want to get young in God. They say, no, we are not going. You go first, God, clean out those giants, and then we will go. God, then, said, I’m going to let you die out in the wilderness, and I’m going to take your children and they will inhabit the Promised Land.

The next century is the Century of Peace and it’s the Century of the Indigenous. You’re going to come back to your former glory in the next century, and the land that you will inhabit is already inhabited. People are here and you look at them as giants.

Jesus met a man and asked him, how do you see men? The man said, I see men walking as trees. Jesus then knew the man was sick. He rubbed a little spittle on his eyes and said, look at them again. How do you see them now? The man said, I see them as they are. Similarly, you see those in power in America as giants, but God wants to make you giants in the land where you were once sold as a slave and rejected and despised. But many of you are afraid of God’s command to go in and inhabit the Promised Land. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I’ve been to the mountaintop and I looked over and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you but we, as a people, will get to The Promised Land.” The Promised Land, brothers and sisters, is the United States of America.

The Qur’an says that those (rulers) in government got excited, that Moses and Aaron were trying to turn them out of their land. No, you can stay, but only under God’s will. The Bible says that He takes the kingdom from whom He pleases and He gives it to whom He pleases. I don’t want White folks to get upset, but in order for you to remain, you will also have to bow down to God.

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How much time do we have? Did you know that a decree of death has been handed down by God on the United States of America? I don’t want you to take what I am saying as the ravings of a mad man, but America has exceeded the limits. Whenever a nation’s evil outweighs its good, God always sends down that type of decree. But since mercy takes precedence over punishment, He raises from among the abject, the oppressed, a Warner with a warning, and then He gives that nation time to repent.

The violence and the wickedness of the people in the days of Noah is like kindergarten children playing with bean bags in comparison to the violence and the wickedness that pervades America. The wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah-where men were lovers of men instead of the natural attraction to the female-which caused their destruction, is in every city and town in America; and America is glorifying this abomination by using television, radio, and magazines to make a behavior that is unacceptable to God, acceptable to us. To anyone in this audience who is gay or lesbian, I don’t want you to think that we are denigrating you; all of us are sinners and we are no better than you. We are saying, however, that such conduct earned Sodom and Gomorrah the wrath of God. America cannot escape a similar punishment for such activity.

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In my conclusion, family, this Day of Atonement must never die. I’m saying to the United States of America, you have to atone. It does not make me feel good that I have to suffer abuse from government because God has made me bold enough to tell the government that they are wrong, and they must get right or Allah will kill them all.

I’m not an enemy to the Jewish people. You have become an enemy to yourselves. I’m here to call you back to the laws, statutes and commandments from which you have deviated; yet you would call me an anti-Semite? I’m a little boy born in New York in the Bronx, who grew up in Boston on the streets of the ghetto, never dreaming that through the Honorable Elijah Muhammad that one day TIME magazine would say, he’s one of the 25 Most Influential people in America. I don’t have a college degree. I never finished college. My degree is from the Lord of the Worlds.

In Vanity Fair magazine, they listed 65 people that, they say, shape the world. I don’t pay those people. I didn’t tell them to put my picture in there next to His Holiness, the Pope. But it is a fact now. God has lifted your brother, a student of Our Father, and now, all over the world, Black rulers, Black kings, recognize wisdom in this little Son of Man.

Promise Keepers, you did a good thing by calling White males to repent, for the White male is the most guilty; he should repent. And I want you to keep your promise. I was on the west coast recently, and I saw O.J. Simpson, who came to greet us. I told the audience that O.J. won in a court of law and was set free by a jury of his peers because the government could not sustain the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. O.J. should never have had to pay his lawyers if the State of California charged him and couldn’t prove it. The State of California should bear the burden of paying his legal fees. But, in a vindictive way, they brought him back to court, changed the venue and found him guilty of being responsible for a crime of which they already said he was innocent. I don’t quite understand that logic, but let me try it on America.

President Clinton said he wanted to apologize for slavery. I want to say to President Clinton: Sir, you do not have to apologize for slavery because no White folk that are present today had anything to do with slavery. You don’t have to apologize for what you didn’t do. You don’t have to apologize for the Middle Passage because you didn’t do that. You don’t have to apologize for taking away our name, our language, our culture, our God, our religion, our history, because you didn’t do that. You are innocent of that. But I must ask, are you responsible? And I would say to the Whites of this nation and to the White male in particular, you have it good because your fathers built your world on our sweat, our blood, our undeserved suffering. You are not guilty of what happened yesterday, but you are responsible today.

And since you are responsible, White America, if you don’t accept your responsibility to correct the sins of your fathers by giving justice to these who are deprived, then you are no better than your fathers. That’s why the scripture says, “prepare slaughter for the children for the iniquities of their fathers.”

Let the atonement continue. God is angry, and the only way we can turn it aside is: “If My people which are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, forgive their sins and heal their land.”