New Africa of the Palm Beaches’ Model Dialogue series kicks off Sunday, Jan. 23, 2-4 p.m. with: “From King to…Cosby?”

A forum on whether African-America’s glass is half-empty in light of Dr. Bill Cosby’s recent controversial comments. Specially invited to share unique perspective: Edith Bush, executive director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Coordinating Committee, 2011 recipient of Palm Beach State College’s prestigious MLK Individual Leadership Award.

Sunday, Feb. 20: “Where El Hajji Malik el-Shabazz was heading…”

On the anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, Imam Jaabir Muhammad shares unique insight from the days of the original Nation of Islam to our current day.

Sunday, March 20: “Constantine’s Sword”

James Carroll’s compelling documentary exposes the religiously inspired violence and intolerance discovered during his personal search for a better future.

Sunday, April 17: NAPB’s  10^th Annual Family Interfaith Picnic

(Dyer Park, West Palm Beach. More details to come.)

All Programs 2-4 p.m. at

The United Methodist Church of the Palm Beaches

900 Brandywine Road, West Palm Beach 33409

Moderator: C.B. Hanif, multimedia journalist

No admission fee; donations accepted

Join our gatherings featuring remarkable cultural diversity and exemplary models for interaction and cooperation.

Directions from I-95: Exit #71 west onto Palm Beach Lakes Blvd. Turn right at third traffic light and left at stop sign. UMCPB is on left. Room #115. More information call 561-309-5476.

It’s fair to wonder how much, in communities all over our country, the majority of the Tea Party movement will be focused on his message on this King holiday and going forward.

— From my latest commentary in Florida Weekly.

Edith Bush, executive director of West Palm Beach’s Martin Luther King Jr. Coordinating Committee, at the 30th Annual MLK Scholarship Breakfast, Jan. 17 at the Palm Beach County Convention Center.

Read the column here. See the page here. See this week’s entire Digital Edition here. Or just keep reading. More MLK Day scenes:

With MLK Coordinating Committee stalwarts: Palm Beach County Commissioner Priscilla Taylor, and Edith Bush, recipient of Palm Beach State College’s prestigious MLK Individual Leadership Award.

Former City Commissioner Retha Lowe at the Lake Worth MLK Committee's annual Interfaith Prayer Breakfast, Jan. 17 at St. Andrews Episcopal Church.

MLK meets the Tea Party?

Jan. 13, 2011

It’s long been clear whom the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was taking about when he said, “We, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”

He meant, “We, humanity.”

Not, “Just us black folks.”

Dr. King’s outlook definitely was more cosmopolitan than a lot of folks — OK, than I — may once have perceived.

The midterm election developments, the incomprehensible tragedy in Arizona and the Jan. 17 federal holiday that bears his name beg the question: What might things be like if Dr. King met the Tea Party movement?

Imagine the good minister assisting Saint Peter on Pearly Gates duty. Dr. King undoubtedly would welcome Tea Party folks into the Promised Land.

That’s despite the violent imagery and rhetoric exhibited by some of the movement’s members, and which contributes to today’s increasingly toxic political environment.

Having long ago gotten out of the judging business — not to mention having learned a thing or two from Dr. King — I too would let ’em in.

But I also would be keeping a close eye on some of these folks.

Like the ones sporting the “Somewhere in Kenya, a village is missing an idiot” buttons.

Or worse, those who think President Obama has a Martian birth certificate.

And the ones carrying the “We came unarmed this time” signs reportedly seen at Tea Party rallies.

Contrast Dr. King and his colleagues, of whom someone wrote, “They accepted, some more perfectly than others, the good news of redemptive nonviolence.”

He himself once said, “You are to be praised for your willingness to suffer so creatively,” in expressing gratitude to those who routinely risked their lives in communities all over our country to make the American dream a reality.

One such is retired educator Edith Bush, executive director of West Palm Beach’s Martin Luther King Jr. Coordinating Committee, which sponsors the most significant King Day activities around these parts.

Her organization will host its annual MLK Breakfast at the Palm Beach County Convention Center on the federal holiday. It’s part of the weeklong commemorative activities ranging from oratorical to art competitions, and the year-round, largely youth-oriented programs that the nonprofit sponsors each year.

Ms. Bush not only is a civil-rights movement child of segregated Alabama, whose father was a community activist and president of the NAACP.

She’ll be this year’s deserving recipient of Palm Beach State College’s prestigious MLK Individual Leadership Award, during the college’s 12th Annual MLK Breakfast, Jan. 13 on the Lake Worth campus.

This year that breakfast — past speakers have included now-Fox News commentator Juan Williams and the poet Nikki Giovanni — will feature the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. It’s there that Dr. King, like his father before him, was pastor when the civil-rights movement leader was assassinated in 1968.

In talking with Ms. Bush I was reminded that Dr. King’s experience likely would have had Dr. King casting a wary eye on some Tea Party folks.

Even he, she said, noted that there were times when he and his colleagues had “prayed with one eye open.”

So it was encouraging to hear Trent Humphries, a Tea Party movement organizer in Tucson, decry the Jan. 8 shootings that left six people dead and 14 wounded, including Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

“We were sickened,” Humphries said. “Obviously, we do not condone violence.”

There’s also been plenty of commentary on elements within the movement accused of promoting bigotry and violence, so I didn’t think a professional journalist could speak on the movement and not address that.

So I was surprised New York Times national correspondent Kate Zernike, speaking at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches about her book, “Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America,” did not mention racism. Only following her remarks did she respond to questions about bigotry.

My guess is the perspective at 125th Street and Lenox in Harlem might skew a bit differently from what Ms. Zernike called her suburban New York City neighbors.

But hey, it’s she who did the research, and wrote the book, and I did learn a few things. Such as her premise that the movement’s two main wings are 1) younger, Libertarian-type voters, and 2) older supporters of President Bush and our military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

She also seemed on to something in saying the movement has served as an outlet and reaction to the economy and to change — whether a president of African-American descent, gay or immigration issues or the House of Representatives’ first female speaker.

It’s all a transient phenomenon, says Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who just defeated Tea Party-backed Sharron Angle for reelection.

“The Tea Party will disappear as soon as the economy gets better” he was telling NBC’s “Meet the Press” the other day. “And the economy’s getting better all the time.”

It’s safe to say that economic relief is one thing most Americans desperately want.

But we need more mutual respect during the vigorous policy debates on how to get there.

Fewer slogans of anger and fear that promote hatred and violence toward one’s fellow countrymen.

We honor Dr. King in part for helping our nation transmute bigotry through his eloquent language and example of forbearance and unity, if not love.

It’s fair to wonder how much, in communities all over our country, the majority of the Tea Party movement will be focused on his message on this King holiday and going forward.

If the Tea Party was manning those Promised Land gates, could Dr. King — or the guy with the model family who allegedly is AWOL from Kenya — get in?

— C.B. Hanif

Lost in the furor over the proposed Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero is a simple fact: The opposition to the center is the strongest argument in favor of it going right where it is planned. By most accounts, much of the opposition is based on an inaccurate conflation of Islam with terrorism, stemming from ignorance about the Muslim religion, culture and people. While troubling, this is hardly surprising in a nation in which a significant minority of Americans believe that our Christian president is Muslim (and so what if he were?).

Jones, a public affairs and government relations strategist, and former executive director of the National Urban League Policy Institute from 2005 to 2010, is refreshingly clear:

Exiling the center to another part of Manhattan will expand and deepen the gulf between the Islamic community and its neighbors. The best way to bridge this gap is to help people understand that their trepidation is based not in reality but born of a myth that has been cruelly exploited. The Islamic cultural center can help span this chasm.

Of course, it’s not fair to expect a minority community to educate the majority, especially when the majority is so hostile to it. Sadly, minorities have long shouldered the burden of proving to the majority that they pose no threat, that they are not inferior and that they, too, deserve everything the majority takes for granted as its due — while patiently enduring misunderstanding and even abuse. They do all this in the face of demands that they are going too fast, pushing too hard and making life too uncomfortable for others.

That was the case in 1963 when white ministers in Birmingham, Ala., accused Martin Luther King Jr. of exacerbating racial tensions by leading protests against the city’s segregation laws. They called his actions “unwise and untimely.” Dr. King responded with his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he wrote: “Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ “

Perhaps because I am a longtime professional news journalist, including the world’s longest serving news ombudsman, I have long seen this as a sad media story, as indicated by recent posts. But we should note that some news organizations, having been swiftboated again by the far-right, are trying to catch up. Also from WaPost:

Mosque debate: New Yorkers take dim view of rabble-rousing outsiders

The story even has this from Republican Rep. Peter King:

“When people say it’s a battle between cultures or it’s about the violence in the Koran, I never buy any of that. You can find as much of that in the Old Testament and the New Testament; for me that is not the issue at all.”

Also Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler:

“It’s only a slap in the face if you think that the people in the congregation are responsible for al-Qaeda,” Nadler said as he sat in his office, where outdated posters, some featuring the Twin Towers, hung on the wall.

A staunch defender of Israel, Nadler said that it is logical that he is fighting for the rights of a Muslim congregation that he said he might very well vehemently disagree with. “Jews, of all people, should know that we have to support religious liberty,” he said. “Because if you can block a mosque, you can block a synagogue…

“I tend to think that Sarah Palin probably doesn’t [understand the Constitution],” Nadler said. “I think that Newt Gingrich is a very bright man; he probably understands it, at least intellectually. But he doesn’t agree with it or care about it enough to avoid trashing the Constitution for political advantage.”

With regard to the Cordoba Initiative’s Manhattan community center: Aside from the fact that, as someone noted, we Americans do not want government (much less Palin or Gingrich) dictating whether we can build houses of worship that are properly zoned, the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg underscored some essential but sadly overlooked elements:

Ah, the “Ground Zero mosque.” Well, for a start, it won’t be at Ground Zero. It’ll be on Park Place, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site (from which it will not be visible), in a neighborhood ajumble with restaurants, shops (electronics, porn, you name it), churches, office cubes, and the rest of the New York mishmash. Park51, as it is to be called, will have a large Islamic “prayer room,” which presumably qualifies as a mosque. But the rest of the building will be devoted to classrooms, an auditorium, galleries, a restaurant, a memorial to the victims of September 11, 2001, and a swimming pool and gym. Its sponsors envision something like the 92nd Street Y—a Y.M.I.A., you might say, open to all, including persons of the C. and H. persuasions.

Or as reported by Ericka Werner:

The group behind the $100 million project, the Cordoba Initiative, describes it as a Muslim-themed community center. Early plans call not only for prayer space but for a swimming pool, culinary school, art studios and other features. Developers envision it as a hub for interfaith interaction, as well as a place for Muslims to bridge some of their faith’s own schisms.

Opponents, including some Sept. 11 victims’ relatives, see the prospect of a mosque so near the destroyed trade center as an insult to the memory of those killed by Islamic terrorists in the 2001 attacks. Some of the Sept. 11 victims’ relatives, however, are in favor.

I suspect that one reason for the opposition from some folks still fighting the Crusades is that the center’s healing & reconciliation premise — indeed its very name — undermines the culture warriors by invoking the spirit of the 800-year period in Cordoba, Spain during which Jews, Christians and Muslims enjoyed unparalleled understanding and cooperation, and thrived together in a way the three Abrahamic faiths have not enjoyed since.

Michael Rowe may have said it best, in his “Thoughts on the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ and the Better Angels of Our Nature“:

The ugliest part of fear mongering is that the “they” and “them” being referred to are other Americans.

Last, for those who didn’t see, here’s Keith Olbermann. Also, Jon Stewart, nailing it all down better than any news organization yet, here, here and here.

— C.B. Hanif

Appreciation to my friend Imam Enrique Rasheed of Jacksonville for alerting me to this item (“Let ‘God’ be ‘God’!”) in an online publication, The American Muslim. The site is another readily available resource that clearly states — contrary to repeated statements by those who don’t know, and others who don’t want to know — that “Muslims Denounce Terror,” and that “Terror Has No Religion.”

The publication also refers readers to “a lengthy collection of Muslim denunciations of terrorism, extremism and violence.” It includes “collections of responses to claims about Islam and Muslims, resources about Islamophobia, and general resources on many topics.”

In short, it’s another of the readily available resources that the professional haters, and too many of my colleagues in the news media, in academia and elsewhere, prefer to claim don’t exist, as they focus attention instead on the relatively few extremists, and the even fewer violent extremists among those, who act in contradiction of the Quran, which is unmistakable in stating that:

“Whoever kills a human being, it is as if he killed all mankind. And whoever saves the life of one, it is as if he saved all mankind” (5:32).

Imam Enrique’s e-mail grabbed my attention because the Malaysia subject came up last week during my excellent Bible class at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-By-The-Sea, where Tom O’Brien currently is guiding us to better understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures.

To hear of Malaysian officials snatching people’s Bibles for using “Allah,” as Arabic-speaking Christians obviously do, and as others the world over routinely translate the Arabic for “God,” sounded patently absurd; inconsistent with reason or common sense. Not to mention a contradiction of the Quran, which prescribes:

“Let there be no compulsion (my italics) in matters of religion” (2:256).

I can’t offer enough appreciation for our Bible class, of which O’Brien says: “The art for us is to find that which is timeless and integrate it into our lives.”

Following the logic of a few misguided folks in Malaysia and elsewhere, however, a Muslim should not be allowed to benefit from such a class. To the contrary, I’m a beneficiary of the growth among many in my country who have left that kind of bigotry behind.

To offer a critique of the excellent essay by my friend Dr. Parvez Ahmed and his co-author, it seemed their piece might have communicated better had it been a bit less academic.

“Normative Islam”? I can see Muslim and non-Muslim eyes glazing over on that one. Among the article’s various descriptions for the “Ultimate Listener,” the “one Possibility,” and the references to the fact that “we worship the same God,” I looked for one clearly recognizing that same God as — The Creator. The Maker — of all we know, and the infinite we don’t know. The One Who says in the Quran, in the chapter titled The Hajj:

“Those on Whom ye call other than God can never create as much as a fly, even if they combined together to do so. And if the fly should snatch anything away from them, they would have no power to recover it” (22:73).

My hopefully constructive criticism echoes the recent outstanding Islamic education session during which a noted imam observed that Muslims often ”don’t talk real enough, we’re talking lofty.”

The words were from Imam Abdul’Haq Muhammed of Ft. Myers, a widely recognized public servant and convener of the Florida Conference of Muslim Americans. Imam Haq, as we affectionately call him, urged that in our local communities we “speak real, talk real. Because people are not up there where we think we are.”

Thus the reminder for myself and others to do more plain talking. With that, let me affirm that I long ago got out of the judging business. The quote marks around “Muslims” in the title of this post are meant to emphasize that by definition, we cannot rationally claim a label that our actions contradict.

For example, in speaking to various groups on these kinds of issues, I often point out that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the Ku Klux Klan, both claimed the Bible. Both claimed to be following the teachings of Jesus Christ, God’s great Word to humanity, upon whom observant Muslims pray Peace.

In that inconsistency is a reminder: that the One Who made us all is sufficient to judge who truly are Christians. And, similarly, who truly follow God’s revelation to humanity  in the Quran, as well as who is sincere to all the other labels we human beings claim.

Mistress of ceremonies Liz Quirantes (R), PBSC President Dennis Gallon, and the PBSC Troubadours onstage to perform "The Star Spangled Banner."

This morning promised yet another chamber of commerce day. But given the lingering coolness in the air, Palm Beach State College President Dennis Gallon made the right call to move the 11th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Breakfast inside the Duncan Theatre on the Lake Worth Campus. The former Palm Beach Community College also made another outstanding choice of keynote speaker. Sheila Johnson, whose credits include part owner of three professional sports teams, spoke in depth of the nexus of sacrifice and deep friendship between Dr. King and another great servant of humanity, Jackie Robinson.

(R-L): PBSC President Dennis Gallon, keynote speaker Sheila Johnson, mistress of ceremonies Liz Quirantes.

Check back later for more on the PBSC program and the comments of Ms. Johnson, founding partner of Black Entertainment Television and herself a legend.

For now I’m behind on several deadlines, and also have more to prepare for Monday’s 8th annual MLK Day Celebration during which I’m honored to be speaking, at the invitation of Carribbean Americans for Community Involvement in conjunction with the Village of Royal Palm Beach.

In addition, earlier that morning, West Palm Beach’s beloved Edith Bush convenes her MLK Coordinating Committee’s umpteenth annual MLK Breakfast at the Palm Beach County Convention Center — from which I’ll be rushing out at bit early this year.

For now, for those who wanted to be present but couldn’t, a few more scenes from PBSC:

PBSC Criminal Justice Institute Academy students with the presentation of colors and pledge to the flag.

The Troubadours.

Wendy S. Link, PBSC board of trustees chairperson, giving opening remarks.

Keynote speaker Johnson...

...had everyone's attention...

... including, to the far right in the balcony, a man after this multi-tasking writer/editor's own heart...

... who paid rapt attention even while working with his red pen.

So did students who lined the balcony.

PBSC's Black Student Union Gospel Choir performed "Lift Every Voice And Sing," the Negro National Anthem.

Student Angela Fontenot delivered a stirring vocal solo.

PBSC Professor Allen L. Webber leading the gathering in "We Shall Overcome."

Go forth and "Dream. Act. Serve." I have long been a fan of Dr. Gallon, his administration, the board and staff at PBSC, for always keeping it all about the students.