Did Whites Blow Up Levees in Black New Orleans Neighborhoods?

By Nicholas Stix

That’s the question being asked by blacks across the country. But the question is merely rhetorical; what blacks repeating it really mean is: WHITES BLEW UP LEVEES IN BLACK NEW ORLEANS NEIGHBORHOODS!

Most whites first heard this racist nonsense from Min. Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam. I know there are people who will say, ‘Don’t be so heavy-handed, Stix. Try and at least appear even-handed and reasonable, as you go through the claims.’

When someone says “The Earth is flat,” “The moon is made of cheese,” or more to the point, “White doctors infected blacks with AIDS,” you don’t humor him or mislead third parties, by giving the impression that you are dealing with someone sane or honest. You either get out the straitjacket or the handcuffs, or you say to the despicable race hoaxer, “You’re a despicable race hoaxer.”

Min. Louis Farrakhan is a despicable race hoaxer.

As Charlotte, NC’s WCNC and other outlets have reported, Farrakhan said, "I heard from a very reliable source who saw a 25 foot deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry."

“Gilton Balanos lived in the very neighborhood Farrakhan was talking about.

"‘I think that's ludicrous,’ Balanos said. ‘When this happened we were caught by surprise. Individuals, the government and everybody were caught by surprise.’”

More recently, in a Time magazine Web interview released on Friday, October 14, Farrakhan employed the forked-tongue style which he switches to when he wants to back away from one of his trademark, fire-and-brimstone statements.

“TIME: Did race or class issues play into the slow U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina?

“Farrakhan: I was not there but the feeling is that race played a part. There are some I heard on TV saying that levee was purposely busted so that the water would come in on that side. They haven't verified the truth of that but some people think that, and that perception is real until truth either verifies it or dispels it.”

(Time was kindly assisting Min. Farrakhan in publicizing his “Millions More Movement,” the Nuremberg-style gathering marking the anniversary of his 1995 Million Man Movement, which begins today in Washington, DC. Isn’t that special?)

First of all, Min. Farrakhan did not say originally that he had heard about the “crater” on TV, anymore than James Dobson said he heard that Harriet Miers would be good for Evangelicals on TV. That means that in at least one of his statements, he lied. (And in the other statement, he may simply have been talking about news reports that mentioned his scurrilous charges.) Second, it is not the case that “perception is real until truth either verifies it or dispels it.” If someone makes dramatic charges without any evidentiary basis, we are under no obligation to listen to him. Indeed, the more extraordinary a charge, the more and stronger the evidence that is required to back it up. Farrakhan’s statement is not “real”; it is his racist fantasy.

Just for the record, let us recall that at the time Katrina hit, New Orleans was a black-run city, as it had been since 1978. Black mayor, black police chief, black DA, and so on, down the line.

One of Farrakhan’s house propagandists, Cedric Muhammad, has expanded on the Minister’s original charge. In his October 3 article, “ The Intentional Destruction of Levees in New Orleans – A Conspiracy Theory? Not In The Light Of History,” Muhammad writes,

“Minister Farrakhan’s teacher, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, wrote, in part, beginning in the 1930s, ‘Of all our studies history is the most attractive and best qualified to reward our research, as it develops the springs and motives of human actions and displays the consequences of circumstances which operates most powerfully on the destinies of human beings.’ His statement has been repeated over the years by many of his students, perhaps most famously by Minister Malcolm X.”

I shall return to the NOI’s respect for history.

Muhammad maintains that the book, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 And How It Changed America by John M. Barry, chronicles that in 1927, various New Orleans business leaders, with the support of public officials, illegally blew up the levees. Muhammad’s argument is, ‘Because there is a precedent for our charges, you cannot say that our charges are untrue.’

Oh, yes I can. The NOI “logic,” or lack thereof, reduces to:

• ‘Because an injustice happened once upon a time, it could happen again.
• And because it could happen, you cannot deny that it did happen.
• Therefore, it happened!’

Such illogic only has a political effect, because influential whites run away from it, like dogs with their tails between their legs, while influential blacks spread it for the sake of making money and influencing people. I say that not, however, to let the average black adult off the hook: Any black adult that promotes such nonsense is just as despicable as Farrakhan.

Since the dawn of humanity, men have committed every sort of evil imaginable. But the mere fact that someone once committed “X” is irrelevant to the question as to whether someone else has now committed a similar crime. You cannot jump form past injustice to present injustice, or from possibility to reality.

Anyone over the age of, say, 30, will recognize in such illogic the “intellectual” basis of all black race hoaxes. The real basis of such hoaxes, however, is white cowardice.

In 1988, after it had become clear to everyone that with her claim to have been kidnapped and gang-raped by “white cops,” Tawana Brawley had perpetuated the mother of all race hoaxes, a white socialist New York political operative told me, “You can’t expect blacks to participate as equals in public debate.”

In English, that translates as “They’re subhuman.”

Often, the “precedent” that supposedly justifies the “possibility” is itself a hoax. For instance, racist blacks rationalized the Brawley hoax, based on the lie that groups of white lawmen had in the past kidnapped and gang-raped black girls. Likewise, racist blacks rationalized the hoax that claimed that white (or Jewish) doctors injected black babies with the AIDS virus, based on the “Tuskegee syphilis experiment.” In the Tuskegee hoax, white doctors supposedly injected black men with the syphilis virus, and then refused them treatment, in order to see, Nazi-style, how their bodies would react.

But in fact, the truth was benign. The black men in the Tuskegee experiment were past the treatment stage; their conditions were in the latency stage. Besides, no effective treatment existed at the time. All the doctors could do was monitor the patients’ conditions, and treat nay other illnesses to which they fell prey.

“Anthropologist Richard Shweder of the University of Chicago has just published a detailed analysis of the Tuskegee study in which he shows that virtually every popular assumption about it is false. (Tuskegee re-examined, January 8, 2004)

“The study was undertaken by ‘progressives’ who wanted to fight a disease that afflicted many blacks, it had the full support of black medical authorities to the end, and—most important—it probably caused no harm to the 140 men (not 400) who took part.”

And so, we have the logic of so many black race hoaxes: Project one lie on to the past, tell a second one about the present, and then join the two. An additional element is that racist blacks take an event in which whites went out of their way to help blacks, and recast it as a case of whites deliberately harming blacks.

“Plan B”

All black race hoaxes are based on “Plan B” demagoguery. The term “Plan B” was made famous by white producer-writer David E. Kelley, on his long-running TV show, The Practice. Faced with an overwhelming case against their guilty-as-hell looking client, the defense lawyers who were the show’s stars would resort to “Plan B”: They would engineer a ridiculous, despicable attempt, with no evidentiary basis whatsoever, to cast guilt on someone else, so as to put “reasonable doubt” in jurors’ minds. It was even a running joke on the show, early on, that the firm’s motto was, “Reasonable doubt for a reasonable fee.”

According to the defense lawyer’s ethos in our adversarial justice system, some seemingly unethical practices are justifiable, though no ethical real-world judge (don’t laugh; there are some) would have tolerated many of Kelley’s TV stunts. (I’m not sure which group Kelley hates more – lawyers or white clergymen. For some reason, he loves black clergymen.)

But at least Kelley showed his fictional defense attorneys – even the black one – as feeling remorse, and even hating themselves, for what they did for a living; the all-too-real Min. Farrakhan appears to have no conscience.

I don’t even know for a fact whether New Orleans’ levees were dynamited in 1927, or even whether author John M. Barry said they were. However, not even Muhammad claims that the levees were dynamited in 1927, in order to harm blacks.

In any event, the question as to whether the levees were dynamited in 1927 is irrelevant. All that matters is whether anyone can provide physical evidence that the levees were dynamited after the passing of Katrina. That’s right: After.

The NOI insists that the levees weathered Katrina just fine, and that only after she passed, did they break. If they were better liars, they would have said that the levees were dynamited as they were hit by Katrina. Perhaps they considered that lie, and decided that people would then have figured that it was Katrina, rather than the dynamite, that broke them. Perhaps I am just giving the NOI’s propagandists too much credit.

That a pathological liar like Min. Farrakhan would claim that someone “saw” a crater is, if anything, grounds to disbelieve his charge. Heck, if Louis Farrakhan told me the sun was shining outside, I’d refuse to leave the house, without my umbrella.

Why am I so lacking in tolerance for the good Minister and his organization? I’m glad you asked. Let’s look at their respective resumes.

The NOI was founded in Detroit in circa 1930 by Wallace Fard, who told his followers that he would pay the passage to Mecca of anyone who murdered a white, or as he called them, “white devil.”

Fard “disappeared” circa 1933, and was replaced by his follower, “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad” (aka Elijah Poole, 1897-1975). Muhammad/Poole spent most of World War II in jail for draft evasion and sedition – he spoke out on behalf of our Japanese enemies. (If only the feds still enforced the Sedition Act!)

Ever since Muhammad/Poole, the NOI has taught that whites are “white devils,” “grafted snakes,” who were created by an evil black scientist, Yacub (“the myth of Yacub”). The NOI stole that idea from black journalist George S. Schuyler’s racial satire, Black No More. Schuyler, in turn, was working a variation on H.G. Wells. But since the NOI had no sense of irony, they butchered Schuyler’s work, and turned satire into Nazi-style pseudo-science.

The last years of Muhammad/Poole saw the NOI swimming in a sea of blood. Beginning circa 1970, the organization undertook a campaign of genocide against California whites, known as the “Zebra Killings.” According to the State of California, the NOI murdered 71 California whites. Most people, if they know of the Zebra Killings at all, know only of the NOI’s roughly six month reign of terror, beginning on October 20, 1973, in San Francisco. During that period in the city by the bay, they murdered 15 whites, and maimed or raped at least nine others. According to crime writer Clark Howard, however, author of the book, Zebra: The true account of the 179 days of terror in San Francisco, the NOI murdered “just under 270” whites across the golden State.

One of the NOI’s goals was to terrify whites into leaving San Francisco, so that they could make it the nation’s first Moslem city.

At about the same time, NOI members were murdering other members in a series of internecine killings. As Arthur Magida chronicles in Prophet of Rage: A Life of Louis Farrakhan and His Nation, under Muhammad/Poole’s leadership, NOI members murdered other members on a regular basis, with the pace of the killings accelerating during the early-to-mid 1970s, particularly in 1973. Magida wrote, “Violence was indispensable to the culture of the Nation of Islam. It was not only in the environment, it was the environment.”

(And yet, Magida contradictorily maintained that only a small minority of the NOI was violent, and he sought to absolve Muhammad/Poole of responsibility for the bloodshed.)

With his levee hoax, Min. Farrakhan was simply projecting his own genocidal wishes onto white folks.

Now, let’s look at Min. Louis Farrakhan’s own record.

When Malcolm X (Malcolm Little) broke with Elijah Muhammad/Elijah Poole in 1964, Farrakhan said, “Such a man deserves to die.” Soon enough, an NOI assassin squad murdered X/Little in the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan’s Washington Heights (not in Harlem as widely misreported by black activists) area.

Other the years, Min. Farrakhan has announced that “Judaism is a gutter religion”; that he was beamed up to a “Mother Wheel” in outer space, where he met the dead Elijah Muhammad, who told him that Colin Powell was planning to wage war on black Americans; demanded that the U.S. give blacks a separate state if their own, and billions of dollars in “reparations”; and once when he became violently ill, he announced that whites had poisoned him. Once, Min. Farrakhan announced that he would receive hundreds of millions of dollars from America’s enemy, Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy. To do so would have been a criminal act: The State Department told Min. Farrakhan, ‘Oh no, you won’t!’

And now, Mr. Farrakhan claims that whites dynamited the levees.

Let us now recall Cedric Muhammad’s words,

“Minister Farrakhan’s teacher, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, wrote, in part, beginning in the 1930s, ‘Of all our studies history is the most attractive and best qualified to reward our research …’”

Don’t make me laugh!

Interestingly, a point that the NOI’s Cedric Muhammad made in his argument that whites had previously dynamited the levees was that the dynamiting took an entire week.

Let’s see. We are supposed to believe that after the storm had passed, and tens of thousands of residents who had refused to leave the city were still living in sight of the levees, that munitions technicians spent days, and perhaps an entire week wiring the levees with explosives, and set off a gigantic blast, yet there were no witnesses?

Case closed.

(When I say “witnesses,” I am not talking of perjurers who weren’t even there, who will now magically materialize to say they saw “everything.” You’d never know it but there was a time no so long ago, when such perjurers went to prison.)

When black folks say, “Whites dynamited the levees” or spread any other race hoax (“Tawana told the truth!” “O.J. was framed!”) they aren’t making factual statements at all. They only seem factual. What they are really saying is, ‘I hate whites to the depths of my soul, and so I will seize upon any current or even ancient event to express that hatred, and thus intimidate white elites and other cowards, and bond with other black racists, and keep hate alive.’ They don’t say it because they believe it is true, but because they know it to be a lie.

Gregory Kane

You may be saying to yourself, ‘Big deal. The NOI is from the lunatic fringe. No one listens to them.’

Would only that it were so. Although only a tiny percentage of American blacks are members of the NOI, millions of black Americans find the NOI ahem, useful.

Even moderate-to-conservative blacks, such as Baltimore Sun columnist Gregory Kane, are echoing Min. Louis Farrakhan, though Kane does not cite Farrakhan by name.

In a column, “Just When and How Did New Orleans’ Levee Break? And Who’s Asking?,” Kane too suggests that whites authorities may have blown holes in the levees.

He doesn’t offer any evidence that the levees were blown up, but rather a series of bizarre segues.

Kane begins by condemning the behavior of the police in nearby Gretna, LA. A bridge connected New Orleans to Gretna. As was widely reported at the time, Gretna police refused to let New Orleanians enter Gretna. Town officials said that the little town was in no position to handle the influx of refugees and would have been overwhelmed.

But that behavior is proof for Kane of a possible genocidal white conspiracy. He even suggests that the very police officers who turned back the New Orleans refugees might have dynamited the levees that sent the people towards Gretna.

Either Greg Kane has taken temporary loss of his sanity and morality, or he has decided to become a “race man,” and permanently given up on decency and honesty.

Let’s look at the situation facing the folks in Gretna. Thousands of people want to descend on your small town. And unlike the national media and the cities across the nation which ended up taking on refugees, as next-door neighbors of New Orleans, you know what is coming your way: Some of America’s worst riffraff. One city that did criminal background checks on New Orleans refugees determined that 54.7 percent of the adults, male and female alike, had criminal records. Over fifty-four percent!

I’m not saying that I would have been that strong. I might have weakened and engaged in what Kane calls “Human Decency 101.” But the police are sworn to serve and protect. Had they permitted the New Orleanians to pass, the latter would have destroyed everything that the citizens of Gretna had worked their entire lives to build, and the officers would have violated their oath. But what the heck, it was just the property of a bunch of predominantly working-class and middle-class white folks. Who cares about them?

Thus Kane:

“It occurred to me that folks who think that way certainly wouldn’t have a problem with sabotaging one of the levees surrounding New Orleans if they could be assured many residents would drown.”

Kane jumps from that racist fantasy to another, in which because a black New Orleans’ resident’s home was not destroyed by Katrina’s initial onslaught, sinister factors must have been at work.

Kane closes by calling for five black-commissioned studies to determine what caused the crevasses in the levees. Fine with me, as long as he really means for black folks to pay for it. I hope you’ll pardon me, however, if I find it more likely that the idea is ultimately to have white folks foot the bill.

Spite TV

And now comes word that Spike Lee is planning on making a fictional “documentary,” arguing that whites blew up the levees. Black folks won’t pay for that, either. Lee owes his entire career of racist, anti-Semitic agitprop to the kindness of white folks. And so it is with his “documentary,” which is being paid for by Lee’s white benefactors at HBO.

The NOI, Gregory Kane, and Spike Lee. That’s the way it is, today, as black civil rights groups, moderates, and NOI and non-NOI black supremacists increasingly join hands in support of black race hoaxes and black criminality. I call it the mainstreaming of genocidal black supremacy – with white help, of course.

Fictional documentaries, and lying, racist sermonizing function to distract people from the truth. Since so many black Americans insist on getting racial and collectivist, let’s get racial and collectivist. Post-Katrina New Orleans was black America’s darkest hour, and white America’s finest. Black Americans didn’t leave town when they could have; they looted; they raped; they murdered; they had their hands out. Black leaders were variously hysterical (Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass); lied (Min. Farrakhan); and tried to shake down whites as DeKalb County CEO Vernon Jones sought to shake down the Red Cross; and so many black leaders spread racist hatred. Meanwhile, those white devils risked their lives to save blacks; sacrificed their time and pay checks to volunteer to help black refugees; donated hundreds of millions of hard-earned dollars to charity (the Red Cross, etc.); and tens of billions of dollars of their precious tax dollars to clean up and rebuild black neighborhoods.

If blacks want a real post-Katrina reckoning, whites end up looking like angels, and blacks …

The more generosity whites show to blacks, the more they can expect blacks to vilify them.