41845358-Antisemitism

252 ANTISEMITISM
group offers for sale Tony Martin’s companion piece, The Jewish Onslaught.
Rightist antisemitic hate groups have employed the Nation of Islam’s “research.”
Thus Matt Hale, head of the World Church of the Creator, which
gained notoriety in 1999 when a member wounded six orthodox Jews near a
synagogue in Chicago and killed a Philippine American postal worker, declares:
“European Whites did not bring the slaves to America. On the contrary,
it was the Asiatic Jews who brought them here (as Louis Fahrakhan [sic]
has also pointed out).” 43
And what should we think of black students who invited Khallid Muhammad
to their campus to insult Jews and engage in rapturous chants every time
he did so? Did they really believe that they would be enlightened by a bigot
who refers to Jews as “so-called Jews,” for, to him, contemporary Jews had no
relationship to the people of ancient Israel who were really black Africans?
Was Khallid saying that these “so-called Jews”—whose ancestors were murdered
by the tens of thousands in mass burnings and by hate-filled mobs during
the Middle Ages and early modern times; again by the tens of thousands at
the hands of rampaging Cossacks in the seventeenth century and nationalist
Ukrainians during the Russian civil war in the twentieth century; and by the
millions in Hitler’s gas chambers and execution pits—that these people, many
of them still faithful to the Law of Moses, are not supposed to feel Jewish or
identify with Jewish history? What insights into current social problems did
these African American college students expect to derive from a hustler who
venomously demeaned gays, feminists, and Pope John Paul II, saw Nazi persecution
of Jews as a response to Jewish wrongdoing, and mocked Holocaust
survivors? “There is no evidence, no proof that 6 million so-called Jews lost
their lives in Nazi Germany,” he told a cheering, applauding, and laughing audience
at San Francisco State University on May 21, 1997. What perspective
on their own tortured history did they anticipate learning at the feet of an intellectual
buffoon and second-rate actor whose handling of facts was about as
deft as a tone-deaf violinist playing Mozart? For example, to diminish the
enormity of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, Khallid, juxtaposing
numbers for effect like a songwriter using June and moon, referred to the
600 million(!) African victims of the slave trade. Professional scholars who
have studied all available records have concluded that some 10 to 12 million
blacks crossed the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries,
about 600,000 of whom came to the Thirteen Colonies and later the United
States. What the audience got from Khallid was vicious rhetoric, rehearsed
posturing, lies, and half truths—the standard litany of demagogues seeking to
captivate an audience. Khallid clearly exemplifies Gates’ astute observation