Views » September 7, 2004

Keyes’ Ideological Quest

By Salim Muwakkil

Alan Keyes, the conservatives’ black attack dog, has been dispatched to Illinois to sully the image of Barack Obama, the state’s Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. Illinois Republicans failed to find an indigenous candidate capable of sinking Obama’s rising star so they drafted Keyes, a 54-year-old Maryland resident and well-known talk-show host who has unsuccessfully run for president and U.S. Senate twice each.

The state has lacked a Republican candidate since embarrassing divorce records forced primary winner Jack Ryan to drop out. Peter Fitzgerald, the Republican who currently holds the seat, is retiring after one term.

Tellingly, the same GOP leaders who selected Keyes never before managed to slate a black candidate to run for a major office in Illinois. Their choice of outsider Keyes was not just a cynical racial ploy: It was a slap in the face of the state’s Republican electorate. It stinks of rank political opportunism and deep hypocrisy, starting with this: Keyes, hired as a black hit man, opposes affirmative action.

And the hypocrisy doesn’t stop there. The Maryland resident derided the decision of Hilary Rodham Clinton to change residences to run for the Senate. Keyes told Fox News on March 17, 2000, that he deeply resented “the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton’s willingness to go into a state she doesn’t even live in and pretend to represent people there.” But Keyes’ lesser-known hypocrisy concerns his professed affection for the equal rights guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence.

He recently chided Obama’s pro-choice votes as upholding the “slaveholder’s positions” for denying unborn children equal rights. Cynics would be justified in questioning Keyes’ affection for equal rights considering his longtime support for the apartheid regime of South Africa, which notoriously denied black South Africans their equal rights.

Keyes served in the Reagan administration as ambassador to the U.N. Economic and Social Council under Jeanne Kirkpatrick and as assistant secretary of state for International Organizations Affairs. The articulate black Reaganite was in great demand as an apologist for the apartheid regime and the administration’s “constructive engagement” policy with it.

He was among the many extreme right-wing elements of the Reagan administration that were absolutely opposed to the leadership of Nelson Mandela, one of the 20th Century’s most revered symbols of freedom.

After he left government service, Keyes became an important lobbyist for the apartheid South African regime, often speaking out against the African National Congress and its international supporters. Keyes was a member of the World Freedom Foundation, a right-wing religious group that actively supported the apartheid government as a bulwark against communism.

He also was listed as an adviser to the International Freedom Foundation (IFF), a U.S. group exposed as a propaganda arm for South African counterinsurgency operations in a famous July 16, 1995, Newsday investigative report. The IFF, which listed several influential conservative figures, was found by Newsday to be “controlled and funded by the South African regime.”

Keyes also worked for the public relations firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly to help facilitate the U.S. appearance of Angola rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, who became the darling of the extreme right in the United States because of his opposition to Angola’s left-leaning government. Until he was killed in February 2002, Savimbi was leader of the Angolan rebel group UNITA, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the laying of millions of land mines. Human Rights Watch reports that UNITA’s indescriminate use of landmines resulted in more than 15,000 amputees in Angola in 1988, ranking it alongside Afghanistan and Cambodia.

Keyes supported Savimbi, a man now said to be one of the most bloodthirsty rebel leaders of the 20th Century, and he opposed Mandela. But he has not been chastened by this ghastly historical error. He has gained the admiration (and funding) of Savimbi’s and apartheid’s supporters, many of whom were the same people. In an ironic way, Keyes’ racial identity gives him considerable room on the ideological fringe and he has cultivated an extensive network of right-wing supporters, some from groups verging on racist ideology. It seems that all right-wingers are happy to have an articulate black apologist available.

But Keyes’ utility as an ideological warrior demeans the voters of Illinois, who seek a senator to represent the state’s interest. Keyes’ crusade also casts aspersions on Obama’s candidacy by suggesting the Illinois senator is merely mounting a racial effort. Perhaps the best that can be said of Keyes’ candidacy is that it assures Illinois will elect a black senator—although that would have happened even without his own destruction of federalism.

• Help In These Times publish more articles like this. Donate today!
• Subscribe today and save 46% off the newsstand price!

• subscribe to print magazine

• stay in touch with our email newsletter

  Subscribe to our regular weekly e-mail newsletter. It's packed with updates on recent and upcoming stories, events, campaigns and things every progressive should be informed about.

   

• email this article to a friend

  Your Name Your Email Recipient Email

  Personal message Thought you might be interested in this article from In These Times.

   

  Please help us prevent spam by verifying the word you see in the image above

  Send to multiple recipients. Just separate each email address with a comma.

• Reader Comments

  I would like to commend Salim Muwakkil for clearly illustrating that Mr. Keyes has a long record of being a puppet of the U.S. ruling class.  When he defended the apartheid regime and UNITA, he certainly opposed the liberation and elevation of African people.  However, to his credit, Mr. Keyes has endorsed Reparations for African-Americans, in the form of tax exemptions for slave descendants, while Mr. Obama has spoken out against Reparations.  In reality both of these men are victims of ethnocide and forced assimilation and both to date are pawns of the Caucasian power structure which has always violated the human rights of Afro-Descendants.
  Both Senator Kerry and President Bush fiercely oppose Reparations for Afro-Descendants while fiercely supporting both Reparations and massive military aid for Israel.  The careers of both Keyes and Obama illustrate the wisdom of the Scruptures: No man can serve God and the devil at the same time.  Or, if you prefer, no Black politician can really serve the masses of his people and the increasingly corrupt American ruling class at the same time.
  Sincerely,
  Malik Al-Arkam
  www.AllForReparations.org

  Posted by Malik Al-Arkam on Sep 8, 2004 at 10:57 AM

  Malik, that’s enough.  Your push for reparations is futile and posting the same pathetic plea after every Muwakkil article is not going to get you anywhere.  Give it a rest for Christ’s sake.

  Posted by Ted on Sep 8, 2004 at 1:51 PM

  Interesting piece. Keyes is going to lose big time. I heard his anti-abortion rant at the RNC
  and he struck me as non compos mentos. I’ve never
  heard him say anything that wasn’t already first
  uttered by the white Right or that was particularly interesting, same old boilerplate
  rant a la Savage or Limbaugh. Interesting that
  the GOP would play this race card so brazenly.
  Obama gave a decent speech at the DNC but he is
  really more of a DLC centrist than progessive.
  I’d vote for him given the incredible alternative
  but hopefully he will be better than Carol Mosely
  Braun in her one term or that bozo Paul Simon.
  Where do the Illinois Dems get these candidates ?
  I know, I know, they are almost always better than the GOP candidates (except Chuck Percy)but that can’t be the standard. Obama has really lucked out this year, let’s hope he uses his
  new opportunity wisely.

  Posted by Michael Hardesty on Sep 8, 2004 at 5:38 PM

  Alan Keyes is an extremely dangerous liar and rabid sociopath badly in need of a Hot Carl from the citizens of Illinois. Whichever group of alarmingly deranged Republican pederasts decided to loose this bug-eyed satanic freak in our state must be exposed and given Black-Eyed Dirty Sanchezes with extreme prejudice. The time has come for the defenestration of these vomitous faith-based idiots, starting with Keyes, to send them crawling broken and humiliated the hell back to whatever horrific sphincter they emerged from.

  Posted by world b on Sep 8, 2004 at 5:52 PM

  World B,

  I totally agree with your sentiments if not the
  manner of expressing them. As an atheist I’m
  getting sick of the fanaticism of these degenerates. I don’t spend my time down at
  the BART station trying to convert them to
  atheism. I think Keyes is actually clinical.
  He looks and sounds like a madman.

  Posted by Michael Hardesty on Sep 8, 2004 at 8:13 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 35 posts.

Also featured Hindering America’s Vote
Audacious and Hopeful
Party Hacks

Full contents
Previous issues
Subscribe and save!

Also by Salim Muwakkil

• The ‘Post-Racial’ President
  Barack Obama navigates a world where color still matters. Posted on August 24, 2009
• Government-Assisted Terrorists
  On May 20, federal and New York City authorities arrested four men on… morePosted on June 16, 2009
• The Irony of Obama’s Boycott
  America's first black president refused to attend a U.N. conference on racism.Posted on April 30, 2009
• African-Americans Back Burris
  The African-American community's unified efforts to retain Roland Burris as the lone black… morePosted on March 26, 2009
• Will Holder Hold Cops Accountable?
  Eric Holder, the first African-American attorney general, takes over a Department of Justice… morePosted on February 26, 2009