Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan sues ADL, Wiesenthal Center for $4.8 billion
He says he’s wrongly accused of antisemitism. The Wiesenthal Center says he’s using the crisis in Israel to get attention
Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
By Beth Harpaz October 27, 2023
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is suing the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center for $4.8 billion, saying that the organizations falsely labeled him as an antisemite.
The lawsuit claims the organizations defamed Farrakhan and violated his right to freedom of religion under the First Amendment because being labeled an antisemite interferes with his God-given mission to uplift Black Americans and “the whole of humanity.”
The Wiesenthal Center called the lawsuit a “legally baseless and misguided” effort to “capitalize on the ongoing tragedies in Israel” and attract attention. “Minister Farrakhan’s attempts to blame others for his own self-sullied reputation are transparent and meritless,” the center said, adding that it was confident it would defeat the “frivolous claims” and “protect its right to call out demagogues like Minister Farrakhan for their damaging rhetoric.”
The 11-count, 72-page lawsuit, with nearly 800 pages of supporting documents, was filed Oct. 16 in federal court in New York and names ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Abraham Cooper, SWC’s director of Global Social Action, as defendants.
“This lawsuit has no merit,” said ADL chief legal officer Steven C. Sheinberg. “Louis Farrakhan is an antisemite. One need look no further than his own words and statements to come away with the same conclusion.”
The lawsuit somewhat confusingly offers Farrakhan’s own rhetoric to counter accusations that he is an antisemite. The suit acknowledges that Farrakhan said in 1984 that Israel used “the name of God to shield your dirty religion,” but claims that his use of the phrase “dirty religion” had “nothing to do with the religion of Judaism” but “everything to do” with those who use religion to “shield” their “dirty practices.”
In attempting to refute accusations that Farrakhan called Hitler a “great” man, the papers cite a 1992 lecture in which he said: “Don’t put on me that I’m an ‘anti-Semite.’ That’s not true. ‘Hitler was great, but he wasn’t good.’ That’s what I said. I said he was ‘wickedly great.’”
The lawsuit further states that Farrakhan “honors, respects, and even admires many members of the Jewish community, including his boyhood idol and one of the greatest violinists, Jascha Heifetz, who was a Russian Jew, and his own Jewish violin teachers.”
The real reason for “opposition” to Farrakhan, the lawsuit contends, is his “viewpoint” that “black people are the real children of Israel.” That, he says, is “not antisemitism, it’s a theological argument.”
The lawsuit cites Farrakhan’s support for Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential run and opposition to an organization called Jews Against Jackson as igniting a “battle of Biblical proportions” between him and the ADL.
Farrakhan also blames Jewish organizations for preventing Netflix from airing a documentary Farrakhan had made in 2018, and cites the ADL’s unsuccessful effort to derail Farrakhan’s 2023 Saviours Day event in Chicago as an example of the organization’s campaign against him.
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