Those who are around my age woke up at the end of December one year and discovered that the “holiday season” around New Year’s became a trio, with the addition of something called Kwanzaa. Oh sure, there were rumblings of a new holiday. But political correctness and #MeToo are essential causes.
Which raises the question, why is a day invented in 1966 by a rapist who ran a Black separatist group is considered by some as a holiday on par with Xmas, Hanukkah, or New Year’s.
While some claim that Kwanzaa is a holiday observed all over the world. Kwanzaa is exclusively an American holiday! It’s not celebrated in any other part of the world (including Africa). The name Kwanzaa comes from a phrase of Swahili origin, “Matunda Ya Kwanza,” and translates as “First Fruits of the Harvest.”
That’s right, it’s supposed to be spelled with only one “a,” but the very name of this supposed holiday is a typo.
Kwanzaa runs from December 26th-January 1st. It’s supposed to be a week-long holiday honoring African culture and traditions but is tainted by its founder and original purpose.
The man who created the holiday, Maulana Karenga, described the 2019 celebration as “An All-Seasons Celebration and Practice of the Good.” The problem with that statement is that Maulana Karenga is anything but good. He was convicted in 1971 of torturing two women who were members of US (United Slaves), a black nationalist cult he had founded.
A May 14, 1971, article in the Los Angeles Times related the testimony of one of the women regarding her torture:
“Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.”
Karanga was convinced that the women were trying to poison him. He and three members of his cult had tortured the women in an attempt to find some nonexistent “crystals” of poison. Karenga thought his enemies were out to get him.
Now I am not a doctor, nor have I ever played one on television, but this Karenga guy sounds like he has “issues.”
Somehow I cannot see rational people wanting to observe a holiday created by such a man (but then again, Al Sharpton led two anti-Semitic pogroms, and he is considered a civil rights leader). Why would anybody want to celebrate a holiday invented by a man who tortured women?
Perhaps Kwanzaa is observed because this part of the Kwanzaa story is rarely mentioned by the mainstream media.
When he invented the holiday, Karenga said his goal was to “give Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.”
Arguably, this holiday raised by some to the level of Xmas has an entirely antithetical purpose. While the first is meant to unify, Kwanzaa is meant to divide.
“On Dec. 24, 1971, the New York Times ran one of the first of many articles on a new holiday designed to foster unity among African-Americans. The holiday, called Kwanzaa, was applauded by a certain 16-year-old minister who explained that the feast would perform the valuable service of ‘de-whitizing’ Christmas. The minister was a nobody at the time but he would later go on to become perhaps the premier race-baiter of the 20th century. His name was Al Sharpton.”
I didn’t know that “de-whitizing” is a word.
Remembering that Sharpton considers himself a Reverend, shouldn’t he rebuke Kwanzaa and his youthful statement? Granted, I am Jewish and don’t totally understand the theology behind Christian holidays. Shouldn’t Sharpton be saying things like “Peace on Earth” or “Goodwill toward man”? Not one of my non-Jewish friends ever told me that Jesus’ message was “blacks only.”
Like Sharpton, the Kwanzaa scam’s creator, Maulana Karenga, admitted it was a fraud. In 1978 he told the Washington Post’s Hollie West:
“I created Kwanzaa,” laughed Ron Karenga like a teenager who’s just divulged a deeply held, precious secret. “People think it’s African. But it’s not. I wanted to give black people a holiday of their own. So I came up with Kwanzaa. I said it was African because you know black people in this country wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American.”
The late Tony Snow laid out what was so wrong about the holiday 33 years after it was founded:
"There is no part of Kwanzaa that is not fraudulent. Begin with the name. The celebration comes from the Swahili term 'matunda yakwanza,' or 'first fruit,' and the festival’s trappings have Swahili names — such as 'ujima' for collective work and responsibility or 'muhindi,' which are ears of corn celebrants set aside for each child in a family.
"Unfortunately, Swahili has little relevance for American blacks. Most slaves were ripped from the shores of West Africa. Swahili is an East African tongue.
"To put that in perspective, the cultural gap between Senegal and Kenya is as dramatic as the chasm that separates, say, London and Tehran. Imagine singing “God Save the Queen” in Farsi, and you grasp the enormity of the gaffe.
"Worse, Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots. No culture on earth celebrates a harvesting ritual in December, for instance, and the implicit pledges about human dignity don’t necessarily jibe with such still-common practices as female circumcision and polygamy. The inventors of Kwanzaa weren’t promoting a return to roots; they were shilling for Marxism. They even appropriated the term 'ujima,' which Julius Nyrere cited when he uprooted tens of thousands of Tanzanians and shipped them forcibly to collective farms, where they proved more adept at cultivating misery than banishing hunger.
"Even the rituals using corn don’t fit. Corn isn’t indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and the crop was carried worldwide by white colonialists.
"The fact is, there is no Ur-African culture. The continent remains stubbornly tribal. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another for sport.
"(…) Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronize black activists and shut them up."
So what is Kwanzaa? It’s the ultimate fraud. It is a holiday created by a man responsible for violently torturing two women. It has a fascist goal of separating the races.
If Black people in America would like to come up with a holiday that celebrates their valuable contribution to America, I would not object—heck, I would probably help celebrate. Nor would I object to a celebration of the Western African culture that many of them lost when they were dragged from their homeland to become slaves in North America
It is hard to understand why anybody would want to follow a violent felon in a made-up holiday that mistakes racism and segregation-ism for spirituality and fiction for history. And especially in the days of “me too,” I don’t understand why black women would encourage this holiday celebration when one considers its inventor. But then again, I never comprehended why women continued to stand behind and promote Bubba Clinton.
But time to cringe: Over the weekend, Sen. Kamala Harris posted a cringy, pandering video making the dubious claim that she celebrated Kwanzaa as a kid growing up in California.
It is not likely that this is true. Date-wise, it is an outside possibility–granted. Kwanzaa was invented by two years after Harris was born. But she claims she celebrated it during her entire childhood.
Harris made this absurd claim in a new video posted last weekend:
In the video, Harris says: "Happy holidays, everyone. I wanted to take a moment to send my warmest wishes to everyone celebrating Kwanzaa. Like so many other holidays, we will be celebrating Kwanzaa a little bit differently this season in our home. We’ll be doing it over Zoom.
"You know, my sister and I, we grew up celebrating Kwanzaa. Every year our family would – and our extended family, we would gather around, across multiple generations, and we’d tell stories. The kids would sit on the carpet and the elders would sit on chairs, and we would light the candles, and of course afterwards have a beautiful meal. And, of course, there was always the discussion of the seven principles. And my favorite, I have to tell you, was always the one about self-determination, kujichagulia.
"And, you know, essentially it’s about be and do. Be the person you want to be and do the things you want to do and do the things that need to be done. It’s about not letting anyone write our future for us, but instead going out and writing it for ourselves. And that principle motivates me today, as we seek to confront the challenges facing our country and to build a brighter future for all Americans. So, to everyone who is celebrating, Happy Kwanzaa from our family to yours".
Harris was born in 1964 in Oakland, California. And as a child, she lived for several years in Berkeley, California. Karenga was a black nationalist activist in the Los Angeles area in 1966 when he invented the holiday. It was the same year he was convicted of the assault and the sexual torture of several women. He served several years in prison for the crime and ultimately became an associate professor and chairperson of the black studies department for California State University at Long Beach.
So, while the dates do make it possible for Harris to have celebrated Kwanzaa as a kid, the fact is, the fake holiday didn’t even start reaching people until the 1970s after Karenga got out of prison. Indeed, the holiday didn’t really seep into the black community’s mainstream until the early 1980s. And even by the estimation of PBS, the popularity of the holiday began waning by the 1990s.
The fact is, Harris was already long past being a “kid” by the time the fake holiday had become popular.
Further, Harris’s father (who is a black man from the Caribbean) and mother (from India) divorced in 1971, and five years later, Harris moved with her mother to Canada. So, we are expected to believe that her family immediately began celebrating Kwanzaa in 1966 when it was invented and then kept celebrating it even though a mere nine years later, she lived in Canada with a mother who is not black and has no real connection to black culture? And all the while, the holiday had not yet even begun to seep into the black culture for half a dozen more years after that. To answer that question, leftists might borrow from another East Africa Swahili phrase with no relevance to African-Americans, “Hakuna Matata.”
Truth be told, you can mark Harris’ claim to have celebrated Kwanzaa as a child as something of a fabrication, to put it gently.
Jeff Dunetz is editor/publisher of the blog "The Lid." The political columnist for The Jewish Star, and co-host of the weekly radio show, Host of The Lid Radio show on SHR Media, and is a Leader At Large of Herut NA-the Uts!napologetic Zionis
