Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison is a darling of the progressive movement, which pushed hard for him to be Chair of the Democratic National Committee. But Ellison had to settle for Vice Chair.
An issue that has dogged Ellison his entire political career was his relationship to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam for a decade or more ending in the late 1990s.
Ellison once wrote under the names Keith Hakim, Keith X Ellison and Keith Ellison-Muhammad, and supported and defended the Nation of Islam even as Farrakhan was excoriated in mainstream politics for his anti-Semitism and anti-white racism.
When Ellison ran for Congress in 2006, he disavowed Farrakhan, and downplayed his own role in the Nation of Islam. The Power Line Keith Ellison Archive is a must read. Keith Ellison for Dummies, in particular, has the timeline of Ellison’s career with documents, and his strategic 2006 apology to the Jewish community.
We covered Ellison’s prevarications on Farrakhan in numerous posts:
But even in all those posts, we just assumed Ellison gave up his Farrakhan addiction sometime in the late 1990s, and the rest of his political career was running from that history.
But Jeryl Bier writes at The Wall Street Journal that in 2013 and 2016 Ellison met with Farrakhan, Keith Ellison, Louis Farrakhan and Iran
In September 2013, however, Messrs. Ellison and Farrakhan dined together. The occasion was a visit by Iran’s newly elected President Hassan Rouhani to the United Nations. Mr. Rouhani invited Muslim leaders from around the U.S. to dinner after addressing the U.N. General Assembly. Contemporaneous news reports placed Mr. Farrakhan at the dinner. Unreported by mainstream outlets was the presence of Mr. Ellison, along with Reps. Gregory Meeks of New York and Andre Carson of Indiana. (All three are Democrats; Messrs. Ellison and Carson are Muslim.)The Nation of Islam website documents the event, noting that Mr. Rouhani “hosted the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, Muslim leaders from different Islamic communities and members of the U.S. Congress at a private meeting . . . at the One UN Hotel in Manhattan Sept. 24, 2013 across the street from the UN headquarters.” The Final Call, a Nation of Islam publication, added that “ Keith Ellison of Minnesota . . . participated in the dialogue” after dinner and includes photos of Messrs. Farrakhan and Ellison at the tables. The Michigan-based Islamic House of Wisdom also reported on the meeting, with additional photos.According to Mr. Farrakhan, the 2013 meeting was not the last time he and Mr. Ellison were together. After Mr. Ellison renewed his denunciation of Mr. Farrakhan in 2016, Mr. Farrakhan stated in an interview that Reps. Ellison and Carson had visited him in his Washington hotel suite the preceding summer.
When it comes to Keith Ellison and Farrakhan, once an addict, always an addict.
It won’t keep him from a Democrat leadership position, though. Knowing his Farrakhan addiction, Democrats still rally around him.
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