A Christian view of Minister Farrakhan's Peace Mission

[Editor�s note: Reverends James L. Bevel and Al Sampson worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during some of the most turbulent years of the Civil Rights Movement. Rev. Bevel organized and directed many of King�s grassroots strategies and Rev. Sampson is one of a few pastors ordained by Dr. King. Both pastors accompanied Min. Louis Farrakhan during his recent Peace Mission to Africa and the Middle East.

They recently sat down with Final Call editor James Muhammad in separate interviews to discuss the Peace Mission.]

Final Call News (FCN): What do you think your role was as a Christian minister traveling with the delegation?

Rev. Al Sampson (RAS): I�ve always felt that the three great religions come out of the soil of Mother Africa. This trip taught me more as a minister and pastor and as a theologian, that maybe all these books were one. I saw my role as the other side of Minister Farrakhan. We were really trying to say that our God is one and so are we. We were trying to say that beyond these religious barriers, there is human suffering and pain that occurs because of the decisions by delinquents on the issue of how do men and women sit down and reason things together.

For me, it was a religious pilgrimage because we were really trying to say that for the New Millennium, men and women of all cultures and all religious beliefs have got to stay at the table and talk these things out rather than take innocent peoples� lives and destroy them under the machinations of war.

It became a mission for me because I was in Syria walking on the straight street that�s in the Bible, and I go to the oldest church, St. Anias, in Christianity and preached from the pulpit inside the church in Damascus, Syria. And as a preacher for 46 years in the ministry, I�ve always talked about the Damascus road experience of Paul. But it became not a period at the end of the sentence for me, because at the other end of the straight street, around the corner, was the tomb of Bilal, who was the slave who called the (Muslims to) prayer.

I got a chance to spend a moment with the spirit of two men: one who utilized military exploitations by killing Christians, and the other one who received cultural and economic exploitation as a slave, but both men became Ambassadors for God. And they gave our mission purpose because Minister Farrakhan and myself, we kind of see ourselves as Ambassadors of God to say to some forces, stop economically exploiting our people, and to say to other forces to stop militarily exploiting our people.

Rev. James Bevel (RJB): To observe, to investigate and to purify myself so I can adequately interpret the overriding constitutional violations, because in order to have peace, you have to know what is the constitutional violation. If the constitutional violation is never corrected, there cannot be peace. If my feet are hurting because my shoes are too small and I don�t correct the fact that the shoes are too small, then I will always be complaining about the bunions and the corns on my feet because of the too small shoes. The constitutional violations aggravate the spirit of the people. It�s like a volcano or an earthquake.

RJB: In the Palestinian/Israeli case, both are trying to attain a just outcome that will lead to peace without using the principles and methods that will produce such outcome. In the Iraq situation, it is the criminal behavior on the part of select-President George Bush that is an extension of the criminal behavior perpetrated against the Africans brought here to develop the country, the continued criminal behavior perpetrated against the Native Americans until they had virtually murdered them and taken their land, the criminal behavior against the Vietnamese people, the criminal behavior against the people of Panama and the continued criminal behavior against the African American people. When people have something like a commodity or raw material that the American people want, they (America) always conjure something up, based on their racism, and then they step outside the law and conjure social schemes to justify in the eyes of the American people the murder and robbing and killing of people under the pretense of some great good. That�s what�s going on with Iraq. An observation of that was born out of the statements that Bush made giving the CIA license to murder (Saddam Hussein) and then going to the United Nations to get exemption from International Criminal Court proceedings if they engage in criminal behavior against people. That is the most serious problem.

FCN: How do you feel the Muslims in the area received you as a Christian?

RJB: The grand mufti of Syria demonstrated that they don�t have a sense of separation of Christians and Muslims. That�s a projection from the division in Americans. They respect all the people of the Book. If you are a practitioner, they will deal with you on what principles you practice. If you practice Christian principles, they will experience you as a Muslim because if you take Jesus� position of loving and serving God and God only, then although you are a Christian in culture, functionally you are a Muslim because you will honestly address the health, interests and rights of others as you do your own.

RAS: I feel that the Muslim community has open arms, especially the times when the Minister talked about our religious and historical experience of my opening up the doors of my church to the Nation of Islam. And then he compared that to the people of the Book and how Jesus said in the New Testament that there are some voices which are called by his name, and then going back and picking up the story of the Muslims that came into Ethiopia to the church and those kinds of flashbacks. You read the history and then you are a part of the history that you are reading about really made me feel comfortable. I felt that they felt comfortable with us being there because we were not "infidels" and we represented a new brand of Christianity and not a European understanding of Christianity.

RAS: I got the impression that they understood because the African in America has had a long history of struggle. I never got the feeling that people in the Middle East were blind to that. A lot of them have been to America and their relatives or friends have been to America and they saw, and knew, and understood our struggle. I think that at least some of them have a greater appreciation for who we were because of the Minister�s own credibility and his ability to explain why we have to do this Christian/Muslim relationship, because we are talking about a new religious force inside of our community that if other cultures adopted this idea of no barriers, no boundaries, it would give a whole lot of societies a greater level of communication with each other.

FCN: What do you think was accomplished by the mission?

RJB: The success became evident by today�s paper where the Saudis said, "Not in our backyard." (Referring to Saudi Arabia�s refusing the U.S. to launch an attack on Iraq from their soil.) It was a divine mission. The first night that we arrived, the Minister was negotiating with the Al Jazeerah (television) staff and they asked him to come and be interviewed, and he agreed. Nobody knew Mr. Bush was coming on to give his fallacious plan on how to bring about peace, which was really an attack on the Palestinian people and a promotion of the Israelis. And [the Minister�s] response created a climate of reasoning and a climate of dignity and a climate of truth, not a climate of vindictiveness or fear. It was very effective in terms of strengthening the resolve of people. Sometimes a man needs to hear an intellectual position even though he may be straddling the fence or in fear, but when a state of reasoning can be brought, then the fear does not overtake people. The Minister was very effective in getting those leaders of the Middle East to start thinking in terms of government and principles of law. rather than being stampeded like the U.S. Congress was stampeded.

RAS: One, the Minister is regarded as a world leader that can influence foreign policy on a grand scale. Dr. King once said that sometimes it�s more important for him to threaten that he�s coming than for his actual arrival. And even though we did not get into Israel, the Knesset met as a legislative body to discuss a Black man (Farrakhan) having the moral authority to be involved in foreign policy. The State Department had to have meetings and say, "here is a Black man in foreign policy." I thought that was noteworthy.

On the other side of the coin, the Arab community really listened to Minister Farrakhan and can trust his voice. The Minister was showing the contradictions. And I guess the secret in the Minister�s ministry is that he talks to the leaders, but it is the masses of people across the water that really listen to him. And the leadership in these countries is very frightened at not being able to keep the people asleep. He wakes them up and he makes them responsible. And then they, in turn, hold the leadership responsible. So when Bush gave his speech, the Minister was right there at Al-Jazeerah television and he was the first person, Black or White, that was in the center of history to give a response, which sent a signal to all of the Middle East countries and to send a response back home that (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon, theoretically, could have wrote Bush�s speech and the PLO didn�t get anything. I think that was a major accomplishment.

Also, I don�t get the feeling that the [U.S.] was talking until the Minister started speaking. I think there was a cloud of fear from the White House to everybody�s house to sit down and shut up and let Ashcroft and Bush and Condoleezza Rice and that cabal run everything. The Minister�s position about, "I am a citizen of the United States but I am a citizen of the world and I don�t like the way my country is going and I don�t like the way my world is going" brought all of us into a universality of the Power of God. I think the Minister�s impact on the world stage was a clear picture that not only are Blacks going to get involved in foreign policy, but also we have an actual agenda to return to America and wake up the people.

RJB: The missing factor is the ill response of the American citizens. The way the world is set up, there are two power pockets. The superior force pocket is the United States government, military establishment and the men who run that. But the second most powerful force is the American citizen�s supreme power as responsible citizens. Superior force is not equal to supreme power. When I start thinking about our irresponsibleness as American citizens to let Bush run around threatening to kill people and manipulating and intimidating, and buying and blackmailing and getting UN Security Council members to go along with him, having a right to kill people and that the government should not have to go to criminal court, we can�t live with that. When we lived in the South, the KKK came in and killed people and nobody could checkmate them and they didn�t have to go to court. Now he wants to go around the world killing mainly non-white leaders with the sanctions of the United Nations behind him. That reality bothered me more than anything else. I will not leave these conditions to my children. My work is to bring the citizens� supreme power to bear on this military force that racist White people who have taken over America�s military establishment is attempting to impose on the whole world.

RJB: That�s when I really felt the pain of this (newspaper headline) "CIA gets license to kill?" and how the western papers try to make Libyan President Gadhafi look strange and foolish by the way they write. It�s interesting because they use the same adjectives to describe him as they describe Minister Farrakhan. When we got to Zimbabwe and met President Mugabe and he explained the history and the land reform issue, that 4,000 Whites had 36 million or so acres of land, way out of proportion to their need, and when he was pressed by his own people to take responsibility to make sure justice was brought to this, how America and Britain and the Zionist press use this game to tar and feather people. They have two games they play: They kill men�lynching. And they tar and feather people, that is to make such an ugly image of people that everybody becomes afraid of the man and agree that they can kill the man. I became very aware of the need to dismantle this racist Bush regime and government.

RAS: Zimbabwe became kind of a sacred stop. In 1976, we had the ZANU/ZAPO Movement at our church. So here I am 27 years later, sitting at the table with President Mugabe and visited the grave of (revolutionary) Joshua Nkomo who were our idols in the revolution of the land question. We created the phrase in Chicago "the land grab," which is what has happened to Black urban renewal, which meant Negro removal. We got a great lesson on how revolutionary movement was occurring all over the South, especially in that South African wing of Africa.

And it was a mirror reflection of what�s happening to just about every single Black city in America that a Black mayor sits on. There�s 530 Black mayors and in all these major urban cities, there is a land grab going on, where they will allow us to have the political side of the economy, but not give us access to the economic side of the economy. Which is why, by the way, why I feel Gadhafi is one of the strongest men and a visionary kind of man. He understood that watching us on CNN with the Million Man March that we needed a block of capital, not a grant, but a billion dollars in order to build schools and highways and grocery stores to develop our own economy.

The fear in Zimbabwe with the European and the American forces is that if he becomes successful, it sends a rippling effect to Namibia, to Botswana, Swaziland and then ultimately South Africa. The diamond is of no value except the value that a group of men have placed on it. And our brothers and sisters, especially the brothers, have to go 100 miles down in the ground for the gold and diamonds with no benefits, just for people in European and American countries.

RJB: When you are not truthful, not constitutional, and you�re not democratic, then you cannot mobilize and motivate and organize people based on truth. So you have to use hate or fear, which means you have to tell lies. That�s what they�re doing. [Bush] rules by lies, hate and fear. That then becomes a game to solidify his forces. He had no popularity; he is not a duly-elected president; he had no support; he had no program. He cannot advance a policy of intelligent education. He cannot advance a policy of constitutional development. He cannot advance a policy of family life, because a man cannot invite you to where a man is not. So the only thing he can do is play on the hatred, greed and disease of the racist White people and the fear of Black people. He�s playing this terrorist game in order to create a context where he can rule America as an empire. They think they are going to manipulate the American people and world population into some kind of bamboozled high dictatorship that they run. And the Jews that are backing them up in this kind of foolishness will wind up just like the Jews in Hitler�s Germany because they are going to violate so many people by their acquisition and manipulation of the economies that the world is going to turn on them again. The Jews didn�t just wind up in that predicament in Hitler�s Germany. They were reaping something they had sown. I would advise them to study that so they can live in the world with people as brothers and sisters.

RAS: I think a lot of media critics have been very disingenuous towards the Minister�s mission and Rev. Jackson�s mission because there is a direct tie-in between the domestic agenda of rebuilding our cities, our bridges, our highways and our schools, and at the same time taking those monies out of the domestic budget and putting them into the military budget. I was trying to remember what moment in history did we ever have $23 billion given to the Department of Housing, to the Department of Labor. But $23 billion just got voted in the other day for Homeland Security in order to create a domestic surveillance system to invade the privacy of people.

We are worried that brothers and sisters in America might end up with uniforms to go to the Middle East and fight on that soil or to the Sudan to fight on that soil. I think that we are having a 9-11 in our own lives because things that we held dear are now being blown up and torn up by the Bush administration�the right to speak, the right to communicate, the right to dissent is now being blown up by the terroristic legislative acts of Bush and company. He�s on this mission to keep a war economy going so he has to keep finding some enemies to keep perpetuating a war economy so that Boeing aircraft and McCalister, etc., can keep building bombs and building planes.

We have a great opportunity if we can ask God to continue the strength of Minister Farrakhan. I think we have a great opportunity to mobilize our people again. I�m going to be very much concerned about October 16th. It�s the seventh year of our anniversary of the Million Man March, and I think it would be a great opportunity before the November elections to put the whole issue of America in the issue of violence on the National Agenda, which then will have a rippling effect on the international agenda.

Photo Credit: Kenneth Muhammad