March 30, 2012

By: Wayne Simmons and Kerry Patton

 By June 15, 1969, the FBI had successfully infiltrated and was aggressively investigating the admittedly militant Black Panther Party (BPP). And on that day then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover declared “the Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to [the] internal security of the country.”

Hoover pledged 1969 would be the last year of the radical group’s existence. He was wrong.

A year earlier, Hoover had elaborated his concerns about BPP and other organizations like it that the FBI characterized as "Black Nationalist Hate Groups."

Hoover said BPP was “schooled in the Marxist-Leninist ideology and the teaching of Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung, its members have perpetrated numerous assaults on police officers and have engaged in violent confrontations with police throughout the country. Leaders and representatives of the Black Panther Party travel extensively all over the United States preaching their gospel of hate and violence not only to ghetto residents, but to students in colleges, universities and high schools is well."

No matter what you think about Hoover or the FBI’s notorious “covert action program” known as COINTELPRO launched in August 1967 designed “to destroy the Black Panther Party” that was raught with acknowledged improprieties, including questionable “FBI tactics against the BPP [that] were clearly intended to foster violence, and many others [that] could reasonably have been expected to cause violence,” according to the Final Report of the [Senate] Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, Hoover’s FBI nevertheless documented extremist, anti-American activities by militant black hate groups that, today, arguably would meet the definition of domestic terrorism.

Now more than 40 years later, the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) – also known as the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, whose motto is, “Freedom or Death” - and associated groups like the New Black Liberation Militia (NBLM), have also emerged as debatably extremist black socialist separatist organizations that also arguably could meet the government’s various criteria for what constitutes an extremist organization, and that certain of their leaders have consorted with the heads of Islamist terror-supporting states and the Muslim Brotherhood.

In testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in Feb. 2011, FBI Director Robert Mueller said factions of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamist group whose ideology has inspired terrorists like Osama Bin Laden, are in the United States and have supported terrorism here and overseas.

While the Obama administration – especially the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security – have focused considerable attention to rightwing oriented hate groups, some observers believe it has taken a conspicuous hands-off approach toward militant, left-leaning black socialist groups like NBPP and its ilk.

For example, largely dismissed are the circumstances involved in the alleged violations of federal law by some of these groups’ members, such as the Nov. 2008 incident in which NBPP members allegedly engaged in voter intimidation outside a Philadelphia polling location; their leaders and members’ recurring, potentially inciting hate speech; and, just this month, the NBPP’s $10,000 reward and “wanted” poster “for the capture and arrest of George Zimmerman,” the self-proclaimed volunteer neighborhood watch captain in Stanford, Fla. who allegedly killed unarmed 17-year old Trayvon Martin, who Zimmerman said he shot in self-defense as Martin was returning home from a convenience store.

The facts of what happened that led to Martin's slaying are still under investigation by law enforcement authorities, and no arrest has been made.

Criminal defense attorney Eric Schwartzreich told CNN that despite the protesting and demands that Zimmerman be arrested before the police and prosecutor's office have completed their investigations, "calmer heads need to prevail ... This isn't a rush to judgment, this is a stampede to judgement," he said.

Meanwhile, Hashim Nzinga, NBPP's "chief of staff" who echoed the group's bounty on Zimmerman, was arrested for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, according to the DeKalb County, Ga. Sheriff’s Office.

Former Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain told FOX News, “where is the Justice Department relative to the threats being made [against Zimmerman] by the Black Panthers, relative to this particular case? I'm not defending [Zimmerman] or anybody else, I'm just saying, we have due process in this country. It generally starts with an investigation. We don't have the investigation or the facts. And secondly, when an organization or some people make some direct threats on any other citizen - without having been tried - that is illegal and the Justice Department ought to be doing something. We should be just as outraged about that as we are about the death of this young man.”

“President Obama has steadfastly refused to disavow these individuals, and the Attorney General of the United States of America, Eric Holder, has refused to in anyway investigate, let alone prosecute these thugs for their criminal activities, such as voter intimidation,” declared Michael Brown, Under Secretary of Homeland Security for President George W. Bush from 2003-2005, and director, deputy director and general counsel of the Federal Emergency Management Agency from 2001-2005.

Echoing Hoover, Brown said on his Website: “In my opinion, [the NBPP leader] is dangerous to the liberty and freedom for which this nation stands.”

The United States Department of Defense defines terrorism as “the calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.”

Within this definition, there are three key elements - violence, fear, and intimidation - and each element produces terror in its victims.

The FBI says “terrorism is the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives,” and the Department of State defines terrorism as "premeditated politically-motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.”

During the 2008 election, NBPP and two of its members, Minister King Samir Shabazz (Maurice Heath) and Jerry Jackson, were alleged to have engaged in voter intimidation for their conduct outside a Philadelphia polling station. The leader of the party's Philadelphia chapter, Shabazz had been captured in a National Geographic documentary in Jan. 2009 saying: "I hate white people. All of them. Every last iota of a cracker, I hate it.”

Shabazz continued: “We didn't come out here to play today. There's too much serious business going on in the black community to be out here sliding through South Street with white, dirty, cracker whore bitches on our arms, and we call ourselves black men … What the hell is wrong with you black man? You at a doomsday with a white girl on your damn arm. We keep begging white people for freedom! No wonder we not free! Your enemy cannot make you free, fool! You want freedom? You going to have to kill some crackers! You going to have to kill some of their babies!"

The Department of Justice narrowed the charges against Shabazz and dismissed the charges against Jackson – a decision that led to accusations that DOJ under Obama is unwilling to prosecute minorities for civil rights violations. The most notable of these charges was made by J. Christian Adams, who in May 2010 resigned his post at DOJ in protest over what he claimed was the administration’s mishandling of the case.

As the case was being investigated by the US Civil Rights Commission, internal DOJ emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that political appointees were "intimately involved" in the decision to drop the case, including Attorney General Eric Holder.

Then, in October 2010, a leaked draft report of the Civil Rights Commission’s probe stated political officials were extensively involved in DOJ’s decision to dismiss the case, and that DOJ attempted to conceal its involvement. Civil Rights Commission Chairman Gerald Reynolds confirmed that the leaked draft of the Commission’s investigative findings was authentic, but stressed that it was an earlier draft.

The Justice Department has denied the allegations in the report.

DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) said in March 2011 that its seven-month inquiry “found no evidence” that the department’s decision to dismiss the case against NBPP and two of its members was “predicated on political considerations” and that DOJ attorneys “acted appropriately in the exercise of their supervisory duties.”

OPR concluded it “found no evidence of improper political interference or influence from within or outside the department in connection with the decision in this case.”

Now, whether it means anything or not with regards to DOJ’s handling of the officially dismissed NBPP voter intimidation case, the late Andrew Breitbart reported last fall that when Obama was campaigning for president he spoke at a March, 2007 rally in Selma, Ala. where he shared the podium, marched and was photographed with NBPP leader, Malik Zulu Shabazz. Also present was “Prince” Na'jee Shaka Muhammad, the former NBPP leader who now heads the New Black Liberation Militia said in an interview that he and other party members took up arms against Dekalb County, Ga. police officers. In a video taken at an apparent recruitment event, he appears to call for ambushing Dekalb County police officers with automatic weapons.

Displaying a variety of militant-style emblems with equally militant slogans, the NBLM website’s “photos” page shows members mostly dressed in military-style clothing armed with a variety of weapons, including what are at the very least semi-automatic assault rifles. In one photo, a group of young adults are wearing black T-Shirts printed with a round emblem with a scorpion in the middle and the phrase “Special Operation Unit” around it. And they, too, all are carrying what could easily be fully automatic rifles.

Another photo of an armed man carries the caption: “Dr. Khallid’s Vision of a Black Power Movement Shall Live.”

Dr. Khallid undoubtedly is Dr. Khallid Abdul Muhammad, the late violence-espousing NBPP national chairman. Na'jee Shaka Muhammad proclaims he was “the top student of Dr. Khallid.”

Dr. Khallid had been the former national assistant to Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan before being ejected from NOI following his 1993 speech at Kean College in which he declared Jews are “bloodsuckers,” the Pope is a "no-good cracker,” and advocated the murder of all white South Africans who would not leave South Africa within 24 hours of being told to do so.

During his 1998 million youth “hate march” in New York City in which 3,000 police were called in to disperse the unruly crowd, Muhammad exhorted participants to attack the police, beat them … even shoot them with their own guns. Then Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the march had devolved into exactly what he’d predicted it would. It was “filled with hatred, horrible, awful, vicious, anti-Semitic and other anti-white rhetoric, as well as exhortations to kill people, murder people … the speeches given today should not occur [at] any place,” he said.

Muhammad was involved in a recent NBPP “Training Day” that was videotaped and is now being used as a propaganda recruitment tool, similar to how Hezbollah videos of the annual Al Quds Day Parade in Lebanon are used for recruitment.

Despite NBPP’s militant record, in a July 2010 interview with FOX News, Malik Zulu Shabazz said “the New Black Panther Party is not a hate group or a racist organization."

But while protesting at B'nai B'rith International headquarters in Washington, DC, on April 20, 2002, Shabazz was heard to say: "Kill every goddamn Zionist in Israel! Goddamn little babies, goddamn old ladies! Blow up Zionist supermarkets!"

Earlier, he co-sponsored a conference a month after the 9/11 attacks “in which he and a handful of Muslim clerics blamed the Jews for the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Shabazz also declared "Zionism is racism, Zionism is terrorism, Zionism is colonialism, Zionism is imperialism, and support for Zionism is the root of why so many were killed on September 11.” He also referred to Israel and the United States as "terrorists” and later claimed Jews had received advance warning of the attacks.

According to SPLC, NBPP is “a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers. Founded in Dallas, the group today is especially active on the East Coast, from Boston to Jacksonville, Fla.,” and “portrays itself as a militant, modern-day expression of the black power movement (it frequently engages in armed protests of alleged police brutality and the like).”

SPLC further noted that “principals of the original Black Panther Party of the 1960s and 1970s - a militant, but non-racist, left-wing organization - have rejected the new Panthers as a ‘black racist hate group’ and contested their hijacking of the Panther name and symbol.”

In the current issue of Intelligence Report, a quarterly magazine published by SPLC, editor-in-chief Mark Potok, one of the country’s leading experts on extremism, wrote that “the most remarkable development among radical black groups and individuals last year was the continuing spread of so-called ‘sovereign citizen’ ideology, a set of ideas that originated in white supremacist groups of the 1970s and 1980s” that “has nevertheless taken off among African Americans.”

Potok said “sovereigns’ conspiratorial beliefs generally include the claim that Americans are not subject to most tax and criminal laws, including statutes requiring driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations. In the case of the black adherents … these ideas have been melded with selective interpretations of early black nationalists like Noble Drew Ali. Black sovereigns, like white ones, have engaged in a series of criminal acts, drawing up bogus financial instruments, harassing enemies with unjustified court filings, and even illegally seizing houses they do not own.”

“Another noteworthy development among radical black groups,” Potok noted, “was the Nation of Islam’s furious defense of Libyan dictator, Moammar Qaddafi, a sometimes [NOI] benefactor who was killed in an uprising later in the year. [NOI] leader Louis Farrakhan said that US involvement in Libya would hasten the apocalypse. Malik Zulu Shabazz, head of the New Black Panther Party, went further, calling President Obama a ‘nigger police chief’ leading the attack on a ‘black man … on the run, named Qaddafi.’”

In the beginning, NBPP’s leader turned to former members of other militant black socialist movements and enlisted the help of Nation of Islam member, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, who served at the time as Minister to NOI’s Mosque No. 27 in Los Angeles. Muhammad eventually took the reins of NBPP, where he remained its leader until his death in 2001.

Muhammad and Farrakhan remained close. NBPP not only formed an alliance with NOI, but the two groups built upon their relationship and formed a network of like-minded persons with international support.

In 1984, long before NBPP was formed, Farrakhan and President Obama’s former longtime spiritual leader Jeremiah Wright met with Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi in Tripoli at the time Qaddafi and the Muslim Brotherhood had formed a unique relationship.

But Qaddafi wasn’t the only rogue nation-state leader American black nationalist groups met with. In 2010, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejads “shared a hush-hush meal with Farrakhan and members of the New Black Panther Party … at the Warwick Hotel [in New York City] on West 54th Street.”

Past and present members of the various Black Panther movements seem to have an affinity for radical Islamists. During an Occupy Oakland rally in March, ex-Black Panther Party leader Elaine Brown urged the Occupy Oakland protesters “to organize yourselves and arm yourselves for the inevitable Government onslaught.”

Meanwhile, Occupy Oakland Media Committee literature was distributed accompanied by a photograph of Salah Abdul Karim Yassine, a Palestinian accused in 2000 of plotting to bomb the US and Israeli embassies in Paraguay’s capital.

The Anti-Defamation League believes the roots of NBPP can be traced back to former Milwaukee City Council representative, Michael McGee, who once threatened to create a Black Panther Militia unlike anything anyone had ever seen. He succeeded in enlisting black street gangs into his movement and trained them in weaponry, tactics and “a cause to die for.”

In 1990, McGee said “our militia will be about violence. I'm talking actual fighting, bloodshed and urban guerilla warfare."

McGee’s ideological movement of hate quickly took root across the United States. Following a 1990  interview on Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price's nightly radio show, "Talkback," Price’s producer, Aaron Michaels, was so enthralled with McGee’s message and cause that he decided to start his own black supremacy movement in 1991 that he named after the original Black Panther Party - The New Black Panther Party.

Two years later there were enough chapters established across the country that the group’s leaders convened a National Black Power Summit and Youth Rally to unify members. Surprisingly, the pro-black socialist movement invited white supremacy leader, Tom Metzger of the White Aryan Resistance, to speak at the event, proving, in our opinion, that the New Black Panther movement and other racially motivated hate groups care little about their causes, but a whole lot more about their deeper, mutually radical ideologies of socialist separatism. SPLC noted that, while “Metzger is no friend of blacks, both he and NBPP members believe that whites and blacks should live in their own separate countries.”

By now, the extremist nature of NBPP and affiliated and similar groups should be obvious, and, of concern to homeland security authorities who have an obligation to investigate these - and any other extremist or terrorist by definition organization - pursuant to Public Law 107-56, Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, better known as the USA PATRIOT ACT.

Unfortunately, it is our opinion that because some of these organizations have ties to US political elites, that’s not likely to happen.

Wayne Simmons was a CIA Clandestine Services operative for 27 years. In 2004, under the direction of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he was a member of the Pentagon Outreach Program for Military and Intelligence Analysts. In 2008, he served as the Senior Team Leader of the Human Terrain Teams to deploy in Afghanistan. In 2010, he served as the S-2, Senior Intelligence Advisor, Counter Insurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Kabul, Afghanistan. Simmons' new techno-thriller novel, The Natanz Directive, will be published in Sept. by St. Martin’s Press. You can follow him at www.waynesimmons.us.

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Kerry Patton is a combat service disabled veteran who is a senior analyst for WIKISTRAT and teaches terrorism, intelligence and protection management courses for Henley Putnam University. He's worked in South America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe focusing on intelligence and security, and has interviewed current and former terrorists, including members of the Taliban. He's author of, Sociocultural Intelligence: The New Discipline of Intelligence Studies. You can follow him on Facebook or at www.kerry-patton.com.