Dexter Van Zile, the managing editor of the Middle East Forum’s Focus on Western Islamism (FWI), and the Violin Family Writing Fellow at the Forum, spoke to a March 15 MEF Podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
True-See Allah is an admirer of Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam “notorious for his anti-white racism in general, and his antisemitism in particular.” Despite Allah’s vocal support for Farrakhan, Allah was employed as director of a community engagement initiative by Kevin Hayden, the Suffolk County, Mass., district attorney (DA).
Van Zile’s May 2023 American Spectator exposé documented the incongruous association between Allah and Hayden and initiated further scrutiny by Fox News and the Boston Globe. A follow-up FWI investigative article kept the issue in the public eye after Hayden’s office placed Allah on leave in 2022 but retained him on the public payroll. FWI can report that as of February 2024, Allah is “no longer working” for the Suffolk County DA.
Why would a district attorney’s office tasked with law enforcement on behalf of the commonwealth have employed Allah, an unabashed supporter of a black supremacist such as Farrakhan? A 1989 case involving a murder in Boston committed by Chuck Stuart sheds light on the chain of events leading to Allah’s employment. Stuart murdered his wife while driving through Mission Hill, a Boston neighborhood with a large black population. He lied to the police that a black man murdered his wife in a carjacking. The police subsequently arrested and charged a black man who, as subsequent evidence proved, was innocent of the crime.
When the truth emerged, an “aura of shame” descended on Boston in what was seen as a “milestone event” damaging race relations between law enforcement and the black community. In 1998, Troy Christopher Watson finished his prison sentence for a gang-related shooting that eventually caused the victim’s death. Watson was drawn to NOI from listening to sermons while incarcerated, and upon his release, he joined an NOI mosque, changed his name to True-See Shabbaz Allah, and became a member of NOI’s security organization. In the late 1990s, Joe Fitzgerald, a Boston Herald columnist, authored articles praising NOI for its role in encouraging at-risk blacks to take responsibility for their actions.
Struggling to rehabilitate its non-discriminatory reputation after the 1989 Stuart debacle, the Boston police may have seen Allah as a vehicle to build bridges with the black community. The problem is that to do so, law enforcement had to ignore Allah’s connection to NOI. There are parallels to the rationale used by U.S. officials vis-à-vis Islamists. Islamists “undermine the values of Western democracy,” but also enable “young, angry Muslim men” to channel their hostility towards the West into some semblance of order, albeit flawed. The same can be said about NOI and its appeal to disaffected young black men.
Allah worked as a staffer at the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department in 2013 and was pardoned for his crime in 2015. He continued to climb the ranks through 2020. In 2022, DA Hayden hired Allah as director of community engagement, granting “entrée into the African American community to Boston politicians.” The devil’s bargain implied that government officials would gain legitimacy with a black constituency, which in turn would translate into votes. The same dynamic plays out in the U.S. concerning the Islamist movement. Politicians curry favor with Muslim voters by appeasing Islamists while ignoring the Islamists’ anti-Western rhetoric and behavior.
However, there are signs of a challenge to the status quo in both circumstances. In True-See Allah’s case, the post-George Floyd violence committed during the Black Lives Matter riots have made ignoring such deals untenable. In the case of Islamists, October 7 has made it impossible for the American public to avoid grappling with “legitimate concerns” about the presence of “lawful Islamism” in its midst. It should not take a jihadist attack to awaken the public to the danger.
“There are some lines that are still actually uncrossable,” and Allah’s support for a black supremacist did not sit well with the public. There are still sectors of the black community that tolerate Farrakhan’s “hostility towards Jews and towards white people,” and law enforcement may well have been relying on the benefits of improved relations with the black community to risk the chance that the public would not be “connecting the dots.”
If politicians think that associating with Islamists or radicals is going to get them more votes than it’s going to cost them, they’ll continue to do it.
This scenario applies to politicians’ relations with Islamists who want to gain public status and legitimacy. In a yet-to-be-published interview, Muhammed al-Hussaini, an Islamic scholar and counter-Islamist in the U.K., noted that British Islamist organizations engage in “entryism” – tapping “civil society institutions” to gain credibility with and access to larger society. One example, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), is affiliated with South Asian jihadist organizations. Because the British public is largely ignorant of the group’s hostility, MCB has become a prominent member organization of the IFN.
In the U.S., Abdullah Faaruuq, a radical Boston imam, uses a similar strategy of “entryism” to “maintain his status as an insider” in the city. He makes hateful comments about the U.S., Jews, Israel, and homosexuals. But because he runs a beneficial neighborhood food pantry, he succeeded in ensconcing himself in Boston’s interfaith community and securing hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer-funded government grants dispersed by state officials. Politicians “will engage with anybody that they think ... will get them more votes. That’s really all it is. And if they think that associating with Islamists or radicals is going to get them more votes than it’s going to cost them, they’ll continue to do it.”
Countering “entryism” by Islamists who game the system involves producing exposés that rouse public concern about Islamist manipulation. Sufficient public pressure deprives Islamists of their status, as occurred with True-See Allah. When politicians fear their association with Islamists may cost them elections, “they will start to abandon their erstwhile friends.”
We must “maintain our freedom to speak truthfully” about these issues to oppose Islamists who cry “Islamophobia” to silence critics.
Following the Holocaust, “it was quite clear that people understood that you could not talk about Jews” as people had done historically. Although “that taboo is going away,” “if we can enforce that taboo again” so that people know that if the say hateful things they’ll fail to “achieve the type of status and authority” that True-See Allah enjoyed, “they’re going to keep their mouth shut.”
We must “maintain our freedom to speak truthfully” about these issues to oppose Islamists who cry “Islamophobia” to silence critics. Black supremacists and Islamists who spread hateful dogma will know that “you’re still going to be able to exercise your First Amendment rights ... but we’re not going to trust you with any real authority because we are not confident that you’re going to be able to wield that authority in a manner that respects the rights of other people.”
“If you espouse supremacist ideas that may portray people as unfit and unworthy to exercise their rights onto the Constitution, we’re going to have a fight,” peacefully and lawfully. “That’s what happened with True-See Allah and the Nation of Islam in Boston.”
