THIS week we shall be looking at a group of black Americans who identify themselves as the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel.
They are known as the Hebrew-Israelite-Americans and their movement was started by a black American man called Ben Ammi Ben Israel.
Ben Ammi’s movement would prove to be the most effective movement to take place among the blacks of America.
While movements that were prior to this one were successful in freeing the black minds from mental slavery, they had not managed to achieve the repatriation of the black Americans to a place they could call a homeland.
The only other movement which saw black Americans being returned to Africa was carried out forcefully with help from the USA government, when black Americans basically colonised Liberia in 1863.
Ben Ammi’s movement involved black Americans settling in Israel, establishing their own community there and isolating themselves from Western ways.
Ben Ammi described their return to Israel as going to live in hell, because they would be living alongside the whites who portray themselves as the modern day Jews.
To fully understand the movement of Ben Ammi, we will have to take a brief look at some history pertaining to the land of Israel.
These whites who settled in Israel just recently, in 1947, have been denied by the rest of the nations in the region, stating that they had obvious European ancestry and do not have any bearing on which they could claim to be the biblical Israelites.
Nations like Iran, under their former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have raised alarm that these Zionists (white Jews) only wear a mask of religiosity to achieve their ungodly goals of world dominion.
Other nations have made war with these white settlers since the 1940s when the Zionists colonised Israel.
There has been a lot of world instability since the settlement of the whites in Israel and the people of Palestine who had inhabited those lands since ancient times have been displaced from their homes and are the lower end of an apartheid system which is being upheld by the brutal Zionist regime.
The Zionists or white Jews came to Israel from Europe.
One branch known as the Ashkenazi and Khazar came from Russia and Germany. The other branch known as the Sephardic came from southern European states like Italy, Spain and Greece.
Indeed they were Europeans.
Both these branches had come out of Babylon (Iraq) where they had stayed in the protection of the Roman Empire from 135CE to 708 CE.
The true Israelites, who were black and indistinguishable from Africans, had been last seen in the land of Judea in southern Israel around 70 CE before they were dispersed into North Africa, West Africa and Arabia.
The only evidence of the true Israelites appearing in Europe was during the Moorish period (711 – 1492 CE).
During the Moorish period, the Hebrew Israelites made up a faction of the Moors and Hebrew was one of the two official languages of the Moors, the other being Arabic.
Even in that time the Israelites were identified as blacks and so meant the word ‘moor’.
After the Moorish period there came the new world order, which would suppress the identity of the true Israelites.
The black Americans had since the times of slavery, related the prophesies of the Bible that described the Israelites going into a captivity similar to their experience in ancient Egypt.
Ben Ammi was one such black American and he had his ultimate awakening in 1966 when he was in Chicago.
Ben Ammi saw a vision that instructed him to awaken the blacks of America to their true identity as Israelites.
He was also instructed to gather the ones who would hear his call and to take them to Israel, the land of their forefathers.
Ben Ammi’s work entailed great courage and study of scripture and history.
He became well versed in the missing history of this people and this would make him a great teacher.
He called himself a ‘Man of God’.
Ben Ammi was a very humble man who followed the laws and covenants of Moses. He read the Bible and the Quran because they followed the tenet of his ancestor Abraham.
He kept his hair and beard unshaved and dressed in gowns and kafias and turbans. In the USA of the 1960s, the black people were the foremost victims of unemployment, imprisonment, poverty, drug abuse, alcoholism etc.
The life expectancy of blacks was low and the families were disunited and dysfunctional.
Ben Ammi preached that the blacks of America had been made part of an ungodly civilisation.
America was responsible for the enslavement of the black Hebrews who their constitution defined as ancient Berbers.
Ben Ammi called America the new Egypt, the new Babylon and the land of the captivity of God’s people (Israel).
He taught that, it was written that the devil would disguise himself as an angel of light and form a civilisation that is anti-God.
A civilisation which afflicts God’s people and promotes evil acts such as homosexuality, promiscuity, colonisation and slavery.
He identified the devil’s institution as the Roman Catholic Church and all the other protestant churches that sprang from it.
He taught that the devil himself was the regime of the whites who claimed to be Jews.
Going back to Israel to live next to these whites meant them entering hell to face the devil at his doorstep.
Ben Ammi discouraged blacks to fight through violence because that is the war the whiteman prefers and has a chance of winning.
He quoted the Bible and used it as an authentic historical document containing the history and identity of his people.
Ben Ammi quoted that the United Nations (UN) had recognised the Bible as an authentic historical reference on November 29 1947, when the establishment of Israel by the Zionists was done.
Thus if one people could make use of the Bible to find their identity, then he was going to also use the Bible to find the history and identity of another people who are in search of their history; the black Americans.