The Agricultural Theme of Scripture: Cultivation of the Land and the Man

By Demetric Muhammad

“Hayya alal Falah” “Hayya alal Falah”

Empirical data abounds to demonstrate that while we take pride in a Black man being in the White House, most Black men, women and children are suffering on the economic front. In October 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported White unemployment was 8% and Black unemployment was 15.1%. This is nearly twice the unemployment rate for Whites. The Pew Research Center records that the median income gap between Whites and Blacks in

America is 20 to 1! These alarming economic statistics, among others, have caused many to question whether an alternative philosophical principle like Black Independence should be

pursued with the same vigor and thrust as Black Integration was pursued in the past.

The prime expositor of the modern concept of Black Independence is the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan. He has interpreted and clearly communicated to Black America and the world what was always a staple of the program and position of the Nation of Islam under the direct leadership of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. (See point no.4 of What the Muslims Want, back page of the Final Call.)

This call for land and independence has been renewed in the recent speeches of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, wherein he addresses the top two ills facing Black America: economic ruin and moral decay. And it is within a core tenet of the Nation of

Islam’s teaching that the solution to both problems lies.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad is quoted as saying that

“The solution to our problem is divine.”

Therefore it is on the pages of the divine sacred texts that we find the guiding principles that will lead us to a divine solution. Both the Bible and the Holy Quran specifically give guidance to Jews, Christians and Muslims, guidance that has a strong agricultural or agrarian theme.

Consider that both books offer creation narratives which reveal that Allah (God) created man from the soil of the earth:

“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground…” Genesis 2:7

“And when thy Lord said to the angels: I am going to create a mortal of sounding clay, of black mud fashioned into shape.” Holy Quran 15:28

The man that God created, called Adam, was told in Genesis 2:15 to “keep and dress the garden.” According to Adam Clarke’s Commentary on

the Bible, this passage reveals that

“Horticulture, or gardening, is the first kind of employment on record, and that in which man was engaged while in a state of perfection and innocence.”

American theologian Albert Barnes states similarly:

“Gardening was the first occupation of primeval man.”

Thus, the scriptures reveal that man’s physical body originated from the earth itself and that man was directed by his Creator to manage, oversee and

cultivate a garden—a divine duty and therefore the primary means by which he is to justify his existence and fulfill his ultimate purpose for

Volume 2, Issue 49 2011

The Agricultural Theme of Scripture

being. That a garden provided the original man of the scripture with employment is of specific value in our quest to solve the problems of Black people in America. Our grandparents and parents worked the lands of agricultural plantations in the South under conditions of extreme suffering. So when the industrial revolution began, many Blacks left the South’s plantations and agrarian-based economies in pursuit of what ended up being a different form of slavery in the manufacturing plant(ation)s of the North’s cities.

An excellent portrait of the potential of land and agriculture as a solution for our economic woes can be found in a study of America’s immigrant Jews. Pages 147-338 of The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, Volume 2 (2d ed.), reveal the Jews’ economic monopolization of cotton production. On pages 319-320:

“A single bale of cotton, picked by a Black man or woman for the meager daily wage of 43¢, in the hands of Jewish clothing manufacturers throughout the Lower East Side of New York could be transformed into 215 pairs of jeans, or 690 terry bath towels, or 1,256 pillowcases, or 2,104 men’s boxer shorts, or 3,085 diapers, or 249 bed sheets—and not a penny of these value-added cotton products accrued to anyone with black skin.”

In 1907 1 bale of cotton could produce 800 men’s dress shirts, generating $4,400 in revenue. Adjusted for inflation $4,400 in 1907 would be $105,516.08 in 2011! Thus, the cultivation of the land for cotton production became an economic juggernaut for Northern and Southern Jewish merchants. So much so that today,

according to Steven Silbiger’s The Jewish Phenomenon,

“45 percent of the top 40 of the Forbes 400 richest Americans are Jews.”

Silbiger also reveals the facts that

“One-third of American multimillionaires are Jewish [and] [that t]he percentage of Jewish households with income greater than $50,000 is double that of non-Jews.”

Thus, America has been a “promised land” of economic salvation for European Jews. For the Black man, America has been a place for him to build “treasure cities” for others, while reaping none of the benefits for himself and his children.

In 2008 Forbes magazine used the 7 deadly sins articulated in the Bible to interpret crime statistics and produce its list of Top 10 Sin

Cities. What is significant about Forbes’s listing—which includes Memphis, Tenn.; Detroit, Mich.; Washington, D.C.; New York, N.Y.; and Miami, Fla., among others—is that even though the colossal sin of Black slavery helped establish and contribute to the growth of these cities, the sin of these cities’ criminal behavior is that it is borne

of high levels of poverty and

unemployment among Blacks.

Black crime rates and Black incarceration rates are directly related to Black poverty and Black unemployment. These correlations between crime and poverty are codified in economist and Nobel

Laureate Gary Becker’s economic theory of crime and punishment. Becker’s basic idea is that criminal behavior is not irrational behavior but a

The Agricultural Theme of Scripture type of risk management, where members of impoverished communities routinely consider if the costs of committing crimes are less than the benefits gained. From this theory have come strategies of crime reduction that focus on the reduction of poverty. We can see clearly, then, how Minister Farrakhan’s call for the acquisition and cultivation of the land as a solution for Black America’s economic plight is simultaneously a call for the cultivation of Black America’s spiritual morality.

The agricultural theme is present as well in Islam’s famous call to prayer. The muezzin looks to the right and says “hayya ala salah.” But he looks to the left and says “hayya alal falah.” In geography the right hemisphere is the Eastern Hemisphere and the left hemisphere is the Western Hemisphere. “Hayya ala salah” means “come to prayer” but “hayya alal falah” means “come to cultivation.” The Western Hemisphere is dominated by America. Her “Sin Cities” underscore the unsavory, irreligious history of America, a nation that has never recorded the ministry of a prophet of God and the subsequent founding of a religion on American soil—until the coming of Allah in the Person of Master Fard Muhammad. This lack of divine or spiritual light has left the American people scripturally in the dark, spiritually undeveloped and desperately in need of mental, moral and spiritual cultivation.

The call to spiritual cultivation is symbolized by Jesus when he appeared dressed as a gardener after his Crucifixion and Resurrection. The agricultural theme continues Quranically when believers and doers of good are promised a hereafter or

heaven called “jannah.” Jannah is defined as a garden, so the idea of heaven in Islam is man and woman being in a place of cultivated land and cultivated humans—a divine garden.

The Holy Quran beautifully describes in agricultural terms the raising of Allah’s Messenger and His ministering to the people.

“And Allah is He Who sends the winds, so they raise a cloud, then We drive it on to a dead land, and therewith give life to the earth after its death. Even so is the quickening.” Holy Quran 35:9

This is a beautiful passage that aptly describes Minister Farrakhan’s leadership of Black America, because the wisdom that he is offering our people can give us all economic life and moral life. His call to acquire land, unite and become economically independent is a call for us to

“take our swords and beat them into ploughshares and our spears into pruning hooks.”

So let all of us who believe in Scripture support and promote Minister Farrakhan’s call for land acquisition if we hope to survive the economic and moral collapse of the United States of America.

Black Talent Snatching

An entire white business infrastructure has

been established on the basis of the talent of Black athletes, musicians, dancers, singers, co-medians, and artists of every kind who have set the standard in every field. Whites, whose only discernible talent is their access to a whites-only money supply, sit firmly and immovably over a massive wealth-generating business conglomer-ate that is no different from the old sharecrop-ping model, while deriving incredible profits entirely from Black cultural genius.

Unmistakably, Black culture rules the entire world of entertainment, and Black physical prowess and athleticism are the core attraction of all spectator sports. All noteworthy sports records are now in the hands of Blacks, or soon will be. Rap music has totally engulfed the youth of every nation that hears it, just as with blues, jazz, and rock & roll before it. Hip Hop in every nation and language fuels everything from the nation’s dance parties, to its commer-cial advertising, to its political revolutions. The standard for white singers is Black singers; it’s the same with musicians, dancers, and athletes.

Originally, whites like Al Jolson made ca-reers by actually painting their faces pitch black, affecting a mock Black dialect, and dancing and singing like Blacks for the white audiences that thronged to see them. They called themselves “coon singers” and “black minstrels” and the very first Hollywood movies all featured them. European composer Gunther Schuller said, “The blacks have always invented the music. The whites take it over. Then the blacks invent some-thing new.”

There are the culture bandits—the Gershwins, the Elvises, the Timberlakes, the Madonnas, the Britneys, the Amy Winehouses. But those who sit behind the scenes counting the cash have always main-tained an exclusive hold over the incredible riches and talent. The business agents, managers, producers, technicians, music publishers and dis-tributors, tour managers, copywriters; the team owners,

coaches, lawyers, vendors, franchisers, media, advertisers, studio heads, etc.—a colossal financial enterprise—are almost entirely white, and overwhelmingly Jewish.

For every talented Black athlete and enter-tainer, there are thousands of whites siphoning a living for their families from the consumers paying huge amounts to see and hear that Black individual or his/her pale imitators. The names of the stars are well known, but in America there are at least 403,000 people making—off the backs of these Black individuals—on average $45,000 a year in the fields of performing arts, spectator sports, and related industries.

Possibly the most glaring and widespread exploitation of Black talent is found in college sports, where Black athletes fill stadiums with paying consumers but receive not a single penny for their marketable talent. The only similar business model is slavery itself. If the Black athlete accepts a sandwich or a stick of gum from another person, he is subject to severe penalties—even while his white coaches and athletic departments may—and do—enter into multi-million-dollar private contracts with merchandis-ers, advertisers, and media corporations.

The professional circuit is hardly any better. The individual Black performer who be-comes a “star” sometimes realizes a measure of personal financial gain, but s(he) generates a behind-the-scenes business operation that is exclusively white controlled and highly lucrative.

HOW WHITE FOLKS GOT SO RICH

—David Roediger, historian and author

Federal Bureau of Entrapment: The FBI in Post-9/11 America

By Paul Harris, Guardian UK • 13 December 2011 In June, four men were jailed for 25 years over a

US terror plot. The FBI painted them as dedicated fanatics, but were they lured by the promise of cash from a fake informant?

Imam Salahuddin Muhammad could hardly miss Shahed Hussain when he first appeared three years ago at his mosque in the dilapidated town of Newburgh, just 60 miles up the Hudson River from New York.

Hussain was flash, drove expensive cars and treated people to gifts of cash and food. He also had radical opinions that stood out in a mosque that welcomed Shia and Sunni followers and had good relations with local Jewish and Christian communities.

“This guy said women should not be heard, not

be seen. I thought that was strange," Muhammad told the Guardian as he sat in his office inside Newburgh’s mosque.” Muhammad, who is a black American convert, had no idea how strange things would get.

Hussain would make Newburgh’s Muslim community famous when earlier this year four other black Newburgh Muslims were jailed for 25 years for a 2009 plot to fire a Stinger missile at US military planes. They also planted car bombs, packed with lethal ball bearings, outside Jewish targets in the wealthy New York suburb of Riverdale.

Prosecutors painted them as America-hating terrorists bent on slaughter. All four followed the instructions of Hussain, who meticulously organised the scheme: from getting the missile and bombs, to reconnaissance missions, to teaching the tenets of radical Islam.

The “Newburgh Four” now languish in jail. Hussain does not. For Hussain was a fake. In fact, Hussain worked for the FBI as an informant trawling mosques in hope of picking up radicals.

Yet far from being active militants, the four men he attracted were impoverished individuals struggling with Newburgh’s grim epidemic of crack, drug crime and poverty. One had mental issues so severe his apartment contained bottles of his own urine. He also believed Florida was a foreign country.

Hussain offered the men huge financial inducements to carry out the plot — including $250,000 to one man — and free holidays and expensive cars.

As defence lawyers poured through the evidence, the Newburgh Four came to represent the most extreme form of a controversial FBI policy to use invented terrorist plots to lure targets. “There has been no case as egregious as this. It is unique in the incentive the government provided. A quarter million dollars?” said Professor Karen Greenberg, a terrorism expert at Fordham University.

Lawyers for the Newburgh Four have appealed. Their case will now be heard early next year. It is sure to prompt a re-examination of the way Hussain and the FBI invented a terrorist plot involving impoverished black Muslims in an economically deprived city.

The case will question the new ethos of the FBI, which, since the terror attacks of 9/11, has focused on pre-emptive prosecution. It also raises serious questions as to how the FBI has treated Muslim communities in America, who it says are a key ally in fighting terrorism, and yet are subjected to such tactics.

If the appeal fails, some believe the Newburgh Four case could end up at the Supreme Court. That won’t be much comfort to Newburgh’s Muslim community. “It felt terrible being targeted,” said Muhammad. On his office walls hung several awards praising his work on inter-faith projects and promotion of peace. “We worked so hard to establish this place. Then our beautiful mosque is in newspapers all over the world,” he said.

There is little doubt Newburgh has serious social problems. The wide expanse of Broadway sweeps to the Hudson as grandly as it did in the city’s 19th-

century heyday, but many shops are boarded up. Side streets are full of houses falling apart, boarded up, or burnt out. Even at 9am drug dealers openly ply their trade.

It is this poverty-drenched environment in which Hussain met James Cromitie, a loudmouth Walmart worker who claimed to deal drugs and stolen goods. Exactly why Hussain picked Newburgh is not clear. He had already acted as an informant in another controversial “entrapment” case in Albany, New York, where a local pizza owner and an imam were convicted for terrorist money laundering.

Now Hussain’s brief was to fish for new suspects. He claimed to find one in Cromitie, who was prone to anti-Semitic rants. Hussain coaxed Cromitie along, eventually developing the plot to attack Riverdale and a US airbase on behalf of a Pakistani terrorist group. It was Cromitie who then recruited the other three men — David Williams, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen — to fulfil Hussain’s desire for lookouts.

From then, the FBI prosecution seemed straightforward. After all, even though the plot was fake, the men seemed to think they were carrying out an Islamic terror attack. Prosecutors believed they were a real threat. But it is not that simple.

None of the four men fit the usual profile of a terrorist-in-waiting, let alone an active militant. But they did fit the profile of desperate men who would do anything for money — and Hussain promised massive earthly awards.

For Cromitie, he proffered $250,000: a staggering sum. Hussain also offered to buy him a new BMW, a holiday in Puerto Rico, and a barber shop to set him up in his own business. The other three were also offered thousands of dollars in what must have seemed a miraculous windfall.

Both Williams men had done time in jail and were struggling. Onta Williams, the son of a crack addict mother, had started dealing drugs at 14. Meanwhile Payen, of Haitian origin, was possibly schizophrenic. He urinated in bottles in his bedroom and, when told of a trip to Florida as reward, said he could not go because he had no passport.

In meetings discussing the plot, Payen said little; he just devoured the copious free food Hussain bought. It is not a portrait of radical Islamists. It is a sad picture of life in an urban ghetto.

Blustering Fantasist Yet the FBI treated the gang, especially Cromitie,

as dedicated fanatics. Cromitie certainly disliked Jews. “All the evil in this world is due to the Jews,” Cromitie

told Hussain. But Cromitie also told Hussain he believed President Bush was the anti-Christ and he wanted to kill him “700 times”.

Cromitie falsely claimed to have visited Afghanistan. He said he stole guns from his job at Walmart, yet the shop did not sell firearms. He said he had been jailed for murder and thrown bombs at police stations: all lies.

Cromitie seemed less a terrorist and more a blustering fantasist. Indeed, away from the company of Hussain, there is little sign Cromitie did anything for the plot. When Hussain gave him a camera and told Cromitie to reconnoitre targets, he promptly sold it.

He knew little about Islam; it was Hussain who tried to educate him about jihad. Hussain complained bitterly his pupil was doing nothing. “You’ve not started the first step, brother. Come on,” Hussain griped on tape.

In fact, Cromitie tried to ditch Hussain. For weeks on end Cromitie pretended to leave Newburgh to avoid him. Cromitie ignored Hussain’s phone calls, deleted voice mails and pretended not to be in when Hussain came around his house. He stopped going to the mosque.

Only when Cromitie lost his job, and became desperate for money, did he contact Hussain again. “I told you, I can make you $250,000, but you don’t want it, brother,” Hussain told him.

Now Cromitie agreed and set about finding lookouts. “Ok, fuck it. I don’t care. Ah, man. Maqsood, you got me,” he said, using Hussain’s fake name.

Even further into the plot — when Cromitie again told Hussain he did not think he could do it — Hussain said his overseas terrorist “brothers” might cut his head off. Cromitie came back on side.

The sheer scale and proactive nature of Hussain’s actions has shocked legal experts, Muslim groups and civil rights organisations. They say it went far beyond a fair use of resources in neutralising a real threat. Not only was the entire plot fake, but it seemed only Hussain’s Islamic coaching, talk of cash rewards and constant attention was keeping it alive.

But then Hussain was no normal informant. The entire FBI entrapment strategy in post-9/11 America has drawn fire for using informants with criminal records, shady pasts, financial incentives or a record of deception. Hussain had all four.

“He is a brilliant con man. He could con people about anything,” said Steve Downs, a lawyer with Project Salam, which campaigns on entrapment cases.

At trial, Hussain’s shocking past emerged. He claimed to have been arrested on murder charges in Pakistan. He admitted entering the US on a fake British passport. He had fraud convictions for a driving licence scam. Indeed, he became an FBI informant in exchange for help with those charges.

He claimed to be poor, yet received mysterious sums of money from Pakistan. In 2009 and 2010 he got at least $250,000 that way. He explained having two luxury cars with a bizarre story that Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto gave them to his family on a trip to New York.

He also claimed he never offered Cromitie a quarter of a million dollars, saying the phrase “$250,000” was a secret code name for the plot. Then he confessed he had not told either his FBI handlers or Cromitie of the code’s existence; only he knew about it.

During the entire investigation, he earned $100,000 from the FBI in wages and expenses. In a tough economy, that is well-paid work for a convicted fraudster.

Yet Hussain was the sole personal witness for the FBI. His reports of what Cromitie had talked about were taken as truth, even though Hussain did not record the first four months of their meetings. And, once he began recording, the FBI unusually allowed him to switch the tape on and off. “They gave him a real long leash. He could do whatever he wanted,” said Downs.

Therefore, there are large, unexplained gaps in the tapes, including the final minutes of the plot itself as the bombs were put in position. Hussain claimed — as he often did — that equipment malfunctioned at the vital moment.

Shakespearean Buffoonery Even Judge Colleen McMahon — who put the

Newburgh Four behind bars — slammed the FBI. “Only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr Cromitie, a man whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in its scope,” she said in court. She added: “I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that there would have been no crime here except the government instigated it, planned it and brought it to fruition.”

Those comments did not appease Alicia McWilliams, David Williams’s aunt. “This was a movie script, written by the FBI,” she fumed.

But it is hard to drum up support. Newburgh showed that for a jury the mention of the word “terrorism” can override legal concerns. It also makes campaigning for the Newburgh Four — and other Muslims caught in entrapment schemes — difficult. “Fear does that to people. When you say “terrorism”, that is a powerful word. Even half of my family don’t want anything to do with this,” McWilliams said.

But what were the Newburgh Four thinking? In letters sent from jail, David Williams claimed they were intent on eventually robbing Hussain. Williams had a brother in need of a liver transplant and he said he wanted cash for that. It is a story McWilliams believes.

Muhammad also thinks it might be possible. “Maybe they thought they were playing Hussain for money. But they were the ones being played,” the imam said. Others are not so sure.

Greenb[e]rg believes the men likely knew what they were doing, but were interested in cash, not religion. “From the evidence, they believed in the plot. But they didn’t believe in jihad,” she said. For prosecutors, that was enough to justify the whole scheme. “Ordinary people … would have known better. For Pete’s sake, they would have called the cops when they heard there was a terrorist in town. These four men? They didn’t give it a second thought,” said prosecutor David Raskin in court.

However, that concept disturbs civil rights experts and legal figures, who dislike that FBI informants can offer money to people in return for committing crimes and then prosecute them. “I’m sure you could find hundreds of people, unfortunately, who would agree to commit very bad crimes for money,” defence lawyer Mark Gombiner said.

Some say the FBI has now softened its tactics in the wake of the fallout from Newburgh. Last month, a sting by New York police netted suspected terrorist Jose Pimentel allegedly building a bomb with the help of an NYPD informant. Yet the FBI declined to get involved. It did not consider the man a legitimate threat. “The Newburgh case has had an impact. I know that,” said Greenberg.

But for now the Newburgh Four remain in jail. Their families desperately hope they will be successful in next year’s appeal. And Hussain? With two successful cases behind him, he is an experienced FBI asset. He has now disappeared from those who knew him in Albany and Newburgh. “Maybe he got a new assignment from the FBI,” said Downs.