Syracuse mayor appoints Nation of Islam leader to city’s school board

1/10/2015
Victor Skinner

SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Syracuse’s Nation of Islam representative Mark Muhammad will join the city’s school board at the mayor’s request as a means of quelling violence and improving poor academic performance.

Muhammad is a graduate of Syracuse schools and teaches interpersonal communications and other classes at Onondaga Community College. He also stepped in to ease negotiations between the city’s teachers union and the district’s superintendent this summer at the mayor’s request, Syracuse.com reports.

But it’s Muhammad’s ties to the Nation of Islam – he’s Louis Farrakhan’s local representative – that have some questioning how the group’s radical views on education and race will play into his new role.

And it doesn’t appear that they will get any easy answers.

A Post-Standard reporter questioned Muhammad about his affiliation with the Nation of Islam, and how the group’s beliefs, such as the needed segregation of black and white students, will guide his leadership.

“I have seen some comments suggesting that you are not an appropriate education commissioner because of your involvement with the Nation of Islam. One of the points someone raised, for example, was the NOI’s advocacy of separate schools for blacks and whites. How would you speak to that concern?” the news site asked Muhammad.

“I would say that I am probably the best person to address some of these (race) issues. This whole problem of race we want to ignore. But it is central, an important part of the discussion that we don’t want to have,” Muhammad replied, evading the question.

“I don’t think by avoiding the discussion we make progress. I think we make progress by having those conversations that are uncomfortable for us to have.”

His answers to other questions were equally as vague.

That may be because he doesn’t want the public to focus on the Nation of Islam’s controversial views, or his close relationship with Farrakhan, who has been described as “anti-Semitic” and “anti-white” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In 2013, Farrakhan launched a weekly lecture series online in which he spent “a significant portion of each lecture prophesying the imminent downfall of the United States and advising America to heed his warnings or face divine punishment through severe weather, natural disasters, and world wars,” according to ADL.org.

Farrakhan has claimed “nobody becomes president of the United States without going before Israel or AIPAC and promising the Zionists everything that you think will allow you access to their wealth, their influence, and their power.”

He has also claimed that Hollywood is controlled by Jews who are “promoting that which is against the will of God and … doing it purposely” to control the black community.

“You hate the fact that our rule is going to come whether you like it or not … You know this, so you want to feed us all the filth we can eat, all the debauchery we can stand, so you are now bringing the privacy of sex into public view in your movies, in your magazines, in your newspapers,” Farrakhan has said, according to ADL.

Farrakhan and his followers like Muhammad believe America must return to the “separation” of races by giving blacks “millions of acres of land.”

They believe “you’ll see the end (of the white race) by 2050,” Farrakhan said in his lecture series.

“Separation will save you,” he said. “Separation will give you more time as a white person on this earth.”

The Nation of Islam’s more radical theories suggest the American government is conspiring to kill “two to three billion people on this planet,” and claim such an effort likely is already under way in Africa, where “AIDS is slaughtering black men and women, particularly in those areas where the mineral resources of that area is necessary to keep Americans in power in this 21^st century.”

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