“The Offending Article”, from nypost.com
It’s time for a rant and I hope you’ll agree that we all need to speak up on this.
I’ve just read Bill Cosby’s op-ed in the New York Post – a pale imitation of the New York Times – and what he thinks is a “plague of apathy”. It’s the usual Cosby schtick: go to school, get a job, respect your elders and pull your own weight. All admirable qualities to strive for but Cosby’s now gone and thrown a clanger in the mix, saying that the only people who live up to these ideals are Black Muslims. Yes, that to have a cosy little family-centred up-bringing, we must all take note of a religion whose fundamentalist side is rooted in the patriarchy: women are nothing more than bits of meat, stonings and torture take place over a fair trial and, sorry Bill, but I’ve never known a Christian or Jew to behead others for daring to have different beliefs.
Never mind that the piece is hyperbole anyway (of course), but I’ve read it three times now and it still doesn’t make any sense. It rambles from stories of people growing up and being strung about by controlling parents to mentioning the deaths of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston and then to how we all should emulate Muslims, and that cigarettes and alcohol are more harmful than extremism.
Cosby likes to get in a snit over the smoking of cigarettes (and yes, I’m an out-and-proud chain-smoker, so have a puff on that, Bill) but didn’t cigarettes as we know them today come about after the British soldiers serving in the Crimean War were inspired by the tobacco-smoking Turkish soldiers, and how many of the Ottoman Empire’s armed forces were Muslim? Please correct me if I’m wrong, but could this not be a streak of hypocrisy on Cosby’s part?
There is no such group of “Black Muslims” – it’s instead an umbrella coterie including the Nation of Islam, United Nation of Islam and the Five-Percent Nation – not a land of “mates rates” but a splinter group of the Nation of Islam. If the Southern Poverty Law Center is against them, then shouldn’t we all? Is Mr Cosby happy to sing the alleged praises of these groups’ anti-Semitic and anti-gay and above all, racist, rhetoric?
The Nation of Islam believes that Jewish people are ‘responisble’ for ” … the filth of Hollywood that is seeding the American people …” which smacks of Joseph McCarthy’s mad reign of witchhunts and “reds under the beds”. They even believe that Hitler was “a great man” and leader Louis Farrakhan is noted as saying
“[I’m] not proud of Hitler’s evil toward Jewish people, but that’s a matter of record. Well, in a sense you could say there is a similarity in that we are rising our people up from nothing.”
Charming! The Nation of Islam even has a “Health Minister”, not just a spokesman, accusing Jewish doctors of injecting African-Americans with AIDS. Do you believe that, Mr Cosby?
The United Nation of Islam’s founder is Royall Jenkins, a guy who believes he spent time on a spaceship with angels. And yet Scientology too is based on other unbelievable sci-fi schlock and is espoused by Cosby’s fellow A-listers. And the Five-Percenters are mostly profligated by the dullest hip-hop “artists”, Wu Tang Clan, Nas and Queen Latifah.
Surprisingly the best criticism of Cosby’s half-arsed rant I’ve seen is from a Republican Congressman, Allen West of Florida, who is African-American and tweeted:
Despite being before my time, The Cosby Show always looked like it was for saps anyway. Rubbish for touchy-feely wimps who need to be slapped into the real world. Come on, how could that show have beat Cheers and Roseanne in the ratings? I wonder if the Huxtable kids were schooled not just in respect and common courtesy but Sharia law, too? I’d hate to see an argument between the kids in that house. I’d also check out your own life, Bill. You’ve had quite a few lawsuits and are an adulterer yourself despite your crazed preaching like Pauline Fowler or Peggy Mitchell that family is everything.
It’s not just kids who say the darnedest things, but Bill Cosby too, and why should he get away with it?
The Josh Holley 