Women’s March Leader Defends Decision to Praise Farrakhan as the ‘Greatest of All Time’
During a Monday morning appearance on ABC’s The View, Women’s March co-chair Tamika Mallory defended her past praise for notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan by drawing a distinction between his hateful rhetoric and his political advocacy on behalf of African-Americans.
“I didn’t call him the greatest of all time because of his rhetoric. I called him the greatest of all time because of what he’s done in black communities,” Mallory said when asked about a February social-media post in which she labeled Farrakhan the “GOAT.”
Women's March's @TamikaDMallory defends calling @LouisFarrakhan the "greatest of all time"
"I didn’t call him the greatest of all time because of his rhetoric I called him the greatest of all time because of what he’s done in black communities."
Clip: https://t.co/EVqlZ61it8 pic.twitter.com/OJGHdBbQUb
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 14, 2019
The post in question captured Mallory’s attendance at the Nation of Islam leader’s 2018 Saviour’s Day address in Chicago, during which he described Jews as “satanic” and dubbed them his “enemy.”
Pressed by the The View’s Meghan McCain to explicitly denounce Farrakhan, Mallory repeatedly stated that she disagreed with some of his views, but refused to broadly condemn him and insinuated that asking her to do so amounted to sexism.
In response to the controversy created by Mallory’s Instagram post, the Women’s March issued a statement condemning bigotry in general without mentioning Farrakhan specifically. A number of regional Women’s March chapters, as well as the original Women’s March founder Theresa Shook, disaffiliated from the organization in response to the group’s perceived sympathy for anti-Semitism.
A recent report in the magazine Tablet further cemented the Women’s March’s reputation as an anti-Semitic organization. The report, which Women’s March leaders have dismissed as an inaccurate, alleges that Mallory and her fellow co-chairs disseminated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories at the first meeting they held following President Trump’s election.
The report states that, during the inaugural Women’s March meeting, Mallory and co-chair Carmen Perez “asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people — and even, according to a close secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade.”
The third annual Women’s March on Washington, D.C. is set to take place Saturday. A number of progressive groups that previously sponsored the march, including the NAACP, Emily’s List, NARAL, the National Abortion Federation, and the AFL-CIO, appear to have quietly dropped their support for the group, as their names are no longer listed as sponsors on its website.
