How Do We Fight Xenophobia?

Monday, Feb. 28, 1994 By CORNEL WEST PROFESSOR OF RELIGION AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY AND AUTHOR OF RACE MATTERS
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The fundamental issue regarding the unadulterated bigotry of Khallid Abdul Muhammad, the anti-Semitic claims of Minister Louis Farrakhan and the vicious demonization of both black Islamic fellow citizens by the mainstream media is -- how do we talk about and fight all forms of xenophobia in American life? So far, we have failed miserably. Instead we have become even more polarized, owing to our distrust of one another and our flagrant disregard for the transformative possibilities of high-quality public conversation.

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Let us go back to the beginning of this sad episode, namely, Minister Louis Farrakhan's remarks about Hitler, Judaism and the link of Jewish power to black social misery. Most Americans believe Minister Farrakhan praised Adolf Hitler and, by implication, condoned the evils done to the Jewish people. Yet this is simply wrong. As Minister Farrakhan has noted on many occasions, his statement that Hitler was "wickedly great" -- like Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon and Stalin -- meant that Hitler was famous for his pernicious ability to conquer, destroy and dominate others. Furthermore, Hitler hated black people with great passion. And given Minister Farrakhan's devotion to the cause of black freedom, he would not claim that Hitler was morally great. Nevertheless, the mainstream press portrayed Minister Farrakhan as a Nazi -- that is, a devil in our midst. Surely, if we believe Minister Farrakhan was morally wrong to have once held that whites were devils, it is wrong of us to believe he is a devil.

His obsession with connecting black social misery to Jewish power, including his ugly characterization of Judaism as a "gutter religion" used to legitimate the state of Israel at the expense of Palestinians, is vintage anti-Semitic ideology. Judaism -- like any religion -- can be used for good or bad. His claim that Jews owned 75% of enslaved Africans in this country at a time when there were about 4 million black slaves and 5,000 Jewish slaveholders reveals this obsession. In fact, in 1861, Jews constituted roughly 0.2% of Southerners (20,000 out of 9 million) and 0.3% of slaveholders (5,000 out of 1,937,625).

Minister Farrakhan may be rightly upset that antislavery activism was not predominant among the 150,000 Jews then in America, or that there is no record of any Southern rabbi who publicly criticized slavery -- but there were militant Jewish abolitionists (including Northern rabbis) such as Isidor Busch, Michael Helprin, Rabbi David Einhorn and August Bondi (who fought with John Brown). The expulsion of Jews from Tennessee by Ulysses S. Grant's Order No. 11 in 1862 and new waves of poor East European Jews would yield a more antiracist activism among American Jewry. But even though Minister Farrakhan's anti-Semitic claims are false and hurtful, this does not mean that he is a Nazi or that he has a monopoly on anti-Semitism in America.