March 12, 2024 - 2:00pm
Shaun King has found a new demographic to swindle: Muslims. The Black Lives Matter activist recently declared that he, along with his wife, converted — or “reverted” as Muslims often put it — to Islam on the first day of the holy month of Ramadan, under the guidance of popular Palestinian-American imam Omar Suleiman.
After affirming the Muslim creed — that there is only one God and his messenger Muhammad — King, who used to be a Christian pastor, addressed a crowd, proclaiming that his decision to convert was due to the “past six months of suffering, pain and trauma that we’ve seen in Gaza”. He went on, while donning a keffiyeh, to praise Gazans’ “faith and their devotion to Islam”, which “not only opened my heart but has opened the hearts of millions of people around the world”.
This, however, isn’t going to be the beginning of a genuine spiritual odyssey; instead, it marks the next stage of King’s career as a performative activist. Before it was Black Lives Matter. Now he has detected where the wind is blowing and knows that Palestine, specifically Gaza, is the hottest, most en vogue issue within the activist world.
King’s record as a grifter and pathological fabricator runs long and deep. Many activists have complained about how he has repeatedly received donations in the name of the families of victims of police shootings in America, yet none of the money seems to have ever reached the families, leaving them feeling exploited and denouncing King for profiting from their pain.
In relation to Israel-Palestine, King claimed that he worked “behind the scenes” to secure the release of two American citizens held hostage by Hamas. However, the families have refuted this claim, saying that he was not involved in the negotiations for their release and lied about it.
Religion can be lucrative for hucksters and charlatans. There are plenty of examples across multiple religions of frauds cultivating a loyal, stable and unfortunately credulous following to be shaken down for their personal enrichment. Because Islam and Muslim identity has been racialised for decades, King isn’t simply adhering to a new theology. Rather, he is adopting a new “exotic” racial identity to enhance his branding as an activist fighting for “racial justice” and saving oppressed people. And there’s no better way for King to ingratiate himself with American Muslims before rinsing them than to tub-thump on the question of Palestine.
Don’t be surprised if King organises fundraisers to feed the needy children of Gaza and later can’t prove if the money went to them. If he possessed a genuine desire to help the people of Gaza, then there would be no need to have the added gimmick of converting to Islam alongside it. Plenty of non-Muslims have been emotionally affected by the war in Gaza and feel a deep solidarity with its suffering people, and have done much more to help them than King ever could.
Common humanity is all you need to help the Palestinians — and to do that it’s best to stay well away from Shaun King.
Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.
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SubscribeAfter affirming the Muslim creed — that there is only one God and his messenger Muhammad — King, who used to be a Christian pastor, addressed a crowd, proclaiming that his decision to convert was due to the “past six months of suffering, pain and trauma that we’ve seen in Gaza”.
Nobody tell him about the Holocaust; we don’t need to inflict him on the Jews.
Perhaps, to prove their sincerity, Shaun and the missus ought to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, they are bound to receive a warm reception?
Don’t see why they wouldn’t?
Is he the white man who claims to be black?
Yes, good ol’ Talcum X
I have no sympathy for the simpletons that get taken in by these snake oil salesmen.
I shouldn’t imagine for a moment that his mentor Palestinian-American imam Omar Suleiman believes any of it either.
When he’s served his temporary purpose, they’ll just forget about him.
As a student in the Soviet Union, I studied “History of the CPSU”, “Scientific Communism” and other nonsense of that kind. Even for us, future physicists, these were mandatory disciplines.
Our department of “Scientific Communism” was especially famous; one of its teachers turned out to be an active member of the German Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine during WW2. In my youth, I believed in communism, although with reservations about its implementation, but I remember well that, having heard this story, I said that he did not change his beliefs, but simply, after practical work, moved on to its theoretical grounding.
Here we have something very similar
This guy is quite the shape-shifter, a carnival barker for the digital age, ready to be whatever someone wants him to be, or whatever he can use to make a buck. This is a sad white guy, purposely floundering whatever “privilege” his skin color allegedly conferred in a desperate desire to be relevant, to be a savior, to whitesplain without having to explain that he’s, well, a white guy.
One hopes that once he is exposed as a hypocrite the defrauded Moslems kill him. That is the sort of thing that they do.
Good ol’ Talcum X.
‘Religion can be lucrative for hucksters and charlatans.’ Religions were and are designed and invented by hucksters and charlatans to be lucrative.
Another example of Whitey still clowning the Black Man after four centuries. I thought that Bill Clinton and the white liberals who marched in the civil rights movement of the ’60’s milked that cow dry. Must still be a few bucks to be made in that scam.
“I wrote science fiction stories for a penny a word. Then I started a religion and sat back and watched the millions roll in”. L. Ron Hubbard.