Women’s March Co-President Attends Louis Farrakhan Rally — Again
Women’s March co-founder Tamika D. Mallory poses with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Image by Instagram
By Aiden Pink February 28, 2018
A co-president of the Women’s March movement attended a rally in Chicago on Sunday sponsored by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan — only the latest incident in which she has associated with the man whom the Anti-Defamation League calls “the leading anti-Semite in America.”
Tamika D. Mallory, one of four presidents of the Women’s March, attended the 2018 Saviours’ Day event at Wintrust Arena in Chicago, an annual event organized by the Nation of Islam. Mallory, the former executive director of Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, received a personal shout-out from Farrakhan on the stage, and shared video and a photo from the event on her Instagram page.
Farrakhan made multiple inflammatory comments during his three-hour speech. He claimed that “the powerful Jews are my enemy,” that “the Jews have control over agencies of those agencies of government” like the FBI, that Jews are “the mother and father of apartheid,” and that Jews are responsible for “degenerate behavior in Hollywood turning men into women and women into men.”
Farrakhan has been known to make anti-Semitic comments for decades, including calling Adolf Hitler “a very great man” and claiming that Jews were behind the 9/11 terror attacks.
Despite this, Mallory has on multiple occasions posted on her social media platforms about attending events with Farrakhan, posing for a photo with him in 2015 and sharing the stage with him on Saviours’ Day in 2016. “Thank God this man is still alive and doing well,” she wrote in one post.
It does not appear that Mallory has ever distanced herself from Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic language. Two other co-founders of the Women’s March, Linda Sarsour and Carmen Perez, have also praised and appeared at events with Farrakhan.
Mallory, who was briefly arrested on Tuesday while protesting about immigration in front of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office, did not respond to a request to comment. Neither did spokeswomen for the Women’s March.
The Women’s March deputy head of communications, Sophie Ellman-Golan, who is Jewish, wrote in the Forward last August that she, Mallory, Sarsour and Perez “do not always agree on every single issue or feel the same way about every single individual. Sometimes we say things that cause each other pain. It is painful for me to engage when people like Louis Farrakhan perpetuate the same narrative of ‘satanic global Jewry’ that Nazis do….But we trust and respect each other — and we have faith in our shared dedication to justice and liberation.” She also told Refinery29 last month that she had had multiple conversations with members of the Women’s March team about anti-Semitism.
Farrakhan has been at the center of the news recently after it emerged that two major African-American Democratic leaders, former President Barack Obama and Rep. Keith Ellison had attended events with him years before without the mainstream press knowing about it.
Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter, @aidenpink
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