USA: Nation of Islam Leader Farrakhan calls for impeachment of Bush

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan on Sunday (February 25) angrily denounced the war in Iraq and called for the impeachment of U.S. President George W. Bush in an appearance billed as his final public address. Farrakhan, 73, was released from hospital last month after undergoing a 12-hour abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer. There had been widespread speculation Farrakhan would use what supporters called a farewell speech to name a successor or to shift his movement closer to mainstream Islam. But Farrakhan instead devoted much of a wide-ranging, two-hour address to a critique of Bush's foreign policy. "Our President... through deception and outright lies and the manipulation of the intelligence community...Manipulated the congress after 9-11 to give him permission to go to war in Iraq. They had already degraded Iraq as any military threat in that area. But they thought it would be easy. Some even called it a slam-dunk," Farrakhan said. Farrakhan also said the United States had no right to deny nuclear power to Iran. He urged his almost exclusively black audience to resist the calls of U.S. military recruiters, who he said targeted young people lacking education and opportunity. Thousands of Farrakhan's supporters listened from chairs on the playing field at Ford Field, home to the Detroit Lions football team. Farrakhan's career has been marked by controversy, provocation and charges of anti-Semitism. He once called Judaism a "gutter religion" and praised Adolph Hitler as a "great" man. He was barred from entering Britain in 1986 because the government said he espoused racist views. Farrakhan's address was part of an annual Saviours' Day event marking the birth of the Nation of Islam's founder, W.D. Fard. Active membership in the Nation of Islam is estimated to number in the tens of thousands. Its emphasis on racial separatism and deification of Fard have kept it at odds with mainstream Islam in the past.

ITN Source | February 26, 2007

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