Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 51, No. 23, Ed. 1 Thursday, June 5, 1997 Page: 3 of 24
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IN OUR 51 ST YEARl-THURSDA Y, JUNE 5 1997, TEXAS JEWISH POST 3 F&dtU T6S
L
This liberal-leaning Jew who has for
years been involved in a variety of social
justice causes has just gotten the awaken-
ing of his life. I have come face to face with
the rage of an evil man.
He calls himself a
leader of the black com- -
munity. In front of hun-
dreds of predominantly
African American stu-
dents at San Francisco
State University last week,
Khalid Muhammad,
associated with the
Nation of Islam, delivered
a 90-minute speech enti-
tled “Zionism is Racism”
What ensued was a full-
metal-jacket assault full of
venom, hatred and lies
directed primarily at
Jews.
But not Jews exclu-
sively. Muhammad hates
almost everyone equal-
ly. Decrying homosexuals at San Fran-
“sissy”-co State, he announced, “There
was no homosexuality in Africa.
Homosexuality and other freakishness
were introduced by the white European
devil"
l .
GUEST COLUMN
The writer is a member of the
S.F.-based Jewish Community
Relations Council and a partici-
pant in the S.F.-based Isaiah
Protect, a black-Jewish dialogue
and social action coalition.
Imagine a Jewish community leader
stating in a public forum that “the slave
trade was not that bad,” or that “blacks
didn’t really die and weren’t mistreated.”
The Jewish community would be out-
raged.
- Attacking Israel as
the “criminal settler
colony that has no right
to exist,” Muhammad
said, “Jewish rabbis laid
the foundation to the
theory of black inferi-
ority”
He spoke of the “Jew-
devil,” the “filthy Jew,”
“Jew bastards,” the
“pimp Jew,” the “hook-
nosed Jew,” and on and
on. To these epithets, the
crowd at SFSU gave
thunderous applause.
Huddled in my seat, I
began to pray that this
nightmare would end.
Never before have I seen such a display of
vitriol toward other people. I could only
think that this kind of unrelenting bigotry
reflected that of Nazi Germany.
The libel was identical, even if it was not
lifted from the same evil.
How must Jewish students on
The basest of his diatribes, however, he
reserved for the Jews. He stood in front of this campus feel on a daily
a large swastika onstage and echoed the basis?
rallying cry of all other anti-Semites: that
the Holocaust didn’t happen. And if it did,
it is irrelevant compared to the 600 million
blacks who, he said, have been murdered
in the last 6,000 years.
But Muhammad’s perfor-
mance was only just begin-
ning. He moved on to speak of
Jewish prostitutes, rabbis
sucking blood from the
Education is antidote
for venom at SFSU
penises of circumcised boys, the “Jew-con-
trolled Congress" and the “Jewish-con-
trolled Federal Reserve.”
Even blacks were not immune from his
wrath.
“Nelson Mandela is in the pockets of
the filthy Jew," Muhammad declared, as is
basketball superstar Michael Jordan and
the “faggot-like" flamboyant basketball
star Dennis Rodman. Former NAACP
head Benjamin Chavis also came under
fire as the crowd clapped and laughed at
Muhammad’s hateful jokes.
As I cowered deeper in my seat, I waited
for what might come next. How far could
this evil go? I expected
the worst. At the
crescendo of
the speech, as
he was
ishing
attack oi
the film
indus-
try and its continual displays of blacks killing
blacks, Muhammad said,“h is time for blacks
to make revolutionary movies where blacks
are killing white folks...
“Kill them so hard, slice their heads to
bits right on the screen. Make it so lively
that your popcorn feels it is getting
soaked in blood off the screen!"
He then said he was physically attacked
in Riverside, outside Los Angeles, but the
police stood idly by. So he “deputized" the
SFSU audience, turning them into his per-
sonal guard. He then pointed to the white
cops in the auditorium and assigned dif-
ferent portions of the room to “get” each
officer. My heart raced. I was sure an all-
out riot was about to begin. And the crowd
MEIR p. 12
\
San Francisco State University has received
a lot of publicity in the last few weeks. While
much of it is positive, there is also the famil-
iar story: A hate-monger shows up, waves a
swastika, rants about how Jews are vermin
and that they control the world, suggests that
all whites are devils and that gay people are
evil. On the radio and on
TV, there is the usual flurry -
of attention that hate
speech brings.
And because public uni-
versities in California
fought long and hard to
ensure free speech, this
mean-spirited, terrible
speech can be heard.
When Khalid
Muhammad comes to
town and spills his hate
and deceit, it is easy to fed
despair. That’s the prob-
lem: to overcome the sense
that nothing will ever
change, that racism is
insurmountable, that no one can be trusted.
But we must overcome this hate. We cannot
let it overwhelm us.
If you turned away from the cameras last
week, other powerful, steady, quiet voices
were on campus the day the hate-monger
came, and the next day and the next. In near-
by classrooms, students of
all ages and backgrounds
were hard at work.
More than 40 students
took their Modern
Hebrew final; 50 took their
final in the origins of
Judaism,
\r
GUEST COLUMN
The writer is the director of the
Jewtsh studies profam at San
Francisco State University
Christianity
and Islam; 30 fin-
ished their class in
the Hebrew Bible; 20 were
working on their term
papers in Jewish Ethics
and Morality. And more
than 150 more, in classes
on the Holocaust in the
history, literature and film
departments, were learn-
ing exactly how hating the
Jews and denying their
humanity cascaded into
genocide.
Russian immigrants —
graduate students master-
ing their new language, English — were writ-
ing about the oppression they suffered in the
past Philosophy students were opening the
pages of the Talmud to prepare for their last
class. A lecture series on Zionism was being
offered for the first time on the SFSU cam-
pus.
With dedication, exacting scholarship and
passion, faculty in the quickly growing
Jewish studies program are teaching about
race, class, gender and power. And students
are learning and listening, arguing and ana-
lyzing.
A new class about blacks and Jews in the
media explored the mythology of hate: how
extremists explain complex despair and
social upsets by pointing to the Jews, or the
blacks or immigrants. We studied how any
public fight between blacks and Jews makes
the front page again and again. We allowed
for the frankest of exchanges in dass, for a full
airing of all charges.
Stating your opinions directly to the stu-
dent beside you, not shouting them random-
ly into the air and walking away, turns out to
Photo — RNS/Reuters
N.Y.
a? _.
p
r
Last fall, the class heard from members of
The Isaiah Project, a group of African-
American and Jewish community leaders
who have decided to work together on
addressing the relationship between two
communities that have much history and
many values in common.
Of course, it is harder to hear these voices:
Hate makes the headlines; not so the sudden,
extraordinary miracles that ordinary friend-
ship can bring. To best combat the blindness
of hate, one must really see another human
being's story, to see real differences but also
the real possibility of solidarity.
Democracy is a lot of hard work. If we
want to keep it alive at SFSU, at least three
things must happen.
First, we need the strong support of the
ZOLOTH-DORFMAN p. 12
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Wisch, J. A. & Wisch, Rene. Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 51, No. 23, Ed. 1 Thursday, June 5, 1997, newspaper, June 5, 1997; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth755185/m1/3/: accessed July 13, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .