The truth about Keith Ellison

From the moment Minnesota Fifth District (Mineapolis) Rep. Keith Ellison first arrived on the scene from Detroit and started making a name for himself as a law student at the University of Minnesota, he was a mouthpiece for the Nation of Islam and its revolting ideology. Over the imprecations of his Jewish classmates, for example, Ellison helped bring raving anti-Semitic Nation of Islam speaker Kwame Toure to the the University of Minnesota Law School itself in February 1990.
As a public figure in private practice Ellison befriended the gang leader whose minions committed the most notorious cop killing in Minnesota history. Ellison’s contributions included leading a mob chanting “no justice, no peace” outside the courthouse in support of one of the defendants subsequently convicted of the murder of the police officer. Ellison made himself a low-rent Louis Farrakhan (if that’s possible), even going through a phase during which he appeared in public with the trademark Farrakhan bow tie in the mid-1990’s. There was nothing original about his act.
When Ellison sought to remake himself as a potential national figure, he took to prevaricating and dissembling about his long-time Nation of Islam involvement. Fortunately for Ellison, the Minneapolis Star Tribune cooperated with his makeover by airbrushing his public record in Minnesota. That is the story I told here throughout the summer and fall of 2006, summarizing my research in the Weekly Standard article “Louis Farrakhan’s first congressman” and in the companion post “Keith Ellison for dummies.”
Ellison cast his Nation of Islam act aside after he failed to secure the Democratic nomination for a state legislative seat in 1998, though he was still plying some of the old-time religion in the course of defending cop killer wannabe Kathleen Soliah/Sara Jane Olson at a National Lawyers Guild fundraiser for Soliah in 2000. By that time Ellison was working Marxist shtick on his path to power in the local Democratic Party.
Ellison now embodies the Democratic Party’s alliance with radical Islam. How Ellison reconciles his Islamic faith with the party’s devout belief in homosexual rights, leftist feminism, and every other element of the party’s most radical agenda is a subject that the Minnesota media have somehow left unexplored. But it should come as no surprise to find Ellison peddling his shtick this week in suburban Minneapolis at a gathering of Atheists for Human Rights. The Star Tribune reports:

“You’ll always find this Muslim standing up for your right to be atheists all you want,” Ellison, the first Muslim to serve in Congress, said in a speech to more than 100 atheists at the Southdale Library in Edina. As Minnesota’s first black member of the U.S. House ends his first six months in office, Ellison did not disappoint a crowd that seemed energized the more pointed he made his opinions.
On impeaching Cheney, which the Minneapolis DFLer supports: “[It is] beneath his dignity in order for him to answer any questions from the citizens of the United States. That is the very definition of totalitarianism, authoritarianism and dictatorship.”
On calling the war in Iraq an “occupation”: “It’s not controversial to call it an occupation — it is an occupation.”
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On comparing Sept. 11 to the burning of the Reichstag building in Nazi Germany: “It’s almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it and it put the leader of that country [Hitler] in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted. The fact is that I’m not saying [Sept. 11] was a [U.S.] plan, or anything like that because, you know, that’s how they put you in the nut-ball box — dismiss you.”

In promoting the disgusting conspiracy myths of radical “truthers” and extremist Muslims, Ellison is simply working his latest hustle to the growing audience in the nut-ball box. It’s an audience that includes the Minneapolis atheists who fancy themselves too intelligent to believe in God.