Stephen H Norwood & Eunice G Pollack. Modern Judaism: A Journal of Jewish Ideas & Experience. Volume 40, Issue 2. May 2020.
This article explores how the American white far right—including the Christian Front, Christian Mobilizers, and Gerald L. K. Smith—helped shape the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) antisemitism during the 1930s and 1940s. It also examines the strong influence of Harlem’s pro-Axis Black Fuehrers on the NOI during World War II. Nation of Islam and white far-right propaganda were remarkably similar. Both embraced the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, denied or minimized the Holocaust, and were virulently anti-Zionist. After elaborating on the context within which the Nation of Islam created its ideology, the article explores how the NOI, which originally identified whites, Christians and Jews as devils, adopted an almost singular emphasis on Jews as agents of Satan, the Star of David replacing the cross as the symbol of iniquity. Jews were not victims, but Blacks’ major victimizers; never slaves, but dominant enslavers; not progressives, but those who impeded Blacks’ advance. Instead of giving the world Hebrew Scripture, they converted it into the “Poison Book,” from the beginning crafting a “dirty religion,” which blessed the subjugation of black people, and denied God’s promise to the “Real Children of Israel.” These “imposter Jews” concealed that the Hebrew Bible was a prophecy about “the so-called Negroes of America”—the true “Chosen of God”—who would be in bondage for 400 years, strangers in a strange land.
Tangled Roots: The Antisemitism of the Extreme Right and the Nation of Islam, 1930-1950
In October 1985, the African American socialist Paul Robeson, Jr. published an article in the New York Amsterdam News that placed the Nation of Islam (NOI) and its leader Louis Farrakhan in “the American fascist tradition used by Adolph Hitler as one of the foundation stones of his Nazi ideology.” He titled the article “Brownshirts in Blackface?” Less than two weeks earlier, Robeson had attended Farrakhan’s public address at Madison Square Garden, and he expressed disgust at the many antisemitic statements the Nation of Islam leader made there. Robeson reported that many of Farrakhan’s antisemitic remarks that evening were based on articles that Henry Ford had published in his hate sheet the Dearborn Independent during the 1920s. These articles were largely drawn from, or inspired by, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, one of the most pernicious pieces of antisemitic literature ever issued, which purported to reveal Jewish plans to take over the world. Ford had assembled many of these articles in a volume entitled The International Jew (1920). Robeson noted that Hitler had greatly admired Ford’s “anti-Semitic garbage” and had mounted his portrait over his desk in Nazi Party headquarters in Munich. Robeson provided specific examples of accusations Farrakhan made at Madison Square Garden that were drawn from Ford’s antisemitic propaganda, such as, “Jews … were behind an international conspiracy to foment wars and impoverish nations,” and “Jewish bankers secretly manipulated the U.S. economy.” Like the Nazis, the NOI leader made clear he was defaming the entire Jewish people: “the scriptures charge you with killing the prophets of God.”
In introducing Farrakhan, Abdul Akbar Muhammed claimed that Jews used their allegedly formidable global economic and political power to suppress the truth about their nefarious designs, which Ford’s Dearborn Independent had uncovered. Muhammed compared Farrakhan to a great boxing champion confronting his most dangerous challenger. Referring to Jewish attorney Aaron Sapiro’s 1927 defamation lawsuit that caused Ford to reduce his public involvement in the antisemitic campaign for several years, Muhammed declared: “Now he [Farrakhan] faces the one [the Jews] who knocked out Henry Ford after he wrote a series on ‘The International Jew’.”
Robeson reported that after Farrakhan’s speech, he left Madison Square Garden, “sick … with the stench of fascism in my nostrils.” The white extreme right had indeed long admired the Nation of Islam’s virulent antisemitism, which was almost indistinguishable from its own, from the time it emerged in the 1930s. This intense shared hatred of Jews, along with a commitment to racial separation, provided the foundation for the working relationship the NOI and other African American supporters of the Axis developed with white antisemitic extremists during World War II, as they publicly promoted Nazi Germany and Japan’s war effort. Such cooperation was reestablished in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the NOI joined with the most militant white segregationists in fiercely opposing what each viewed as a Jewish-controlled civil rights movement.
Three days after Farrakhan’s 1985 Madison Square Garden speech, “leaders of neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups met in a gesture of solidarity against Jews and talked of an accommodation with Louis Farrakhan.” In its report on the gathering, the New York Times observed that the white racists who were present, “share considerable common ground with Mr. Farrakhan and … the Nation of Islam.” In addition to supporting a separate nation for blacks, “all maintain that Jews are evil and have taken over control of the United States.” The meeting, held at the farm of a former Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader, included former California KKK Grand Dragon and neo-Nazi Tom Metzger; Edward Fields, director of the National States Rights Party, which claimed that African Americans were a branch of the ape family; Aryan Nations head Richard Butler; and others who were or had been associated with the KKK or the American Nazi and Christian Identity movements.
The Nation of Islam shared the fiercely antisemitic outlook of the white neo-fascist groups formed during the 1930s, most notably Charles Coughlin’s Christian Front and the Christian Mobilizers, as well as of Henry Ford. These groups believed that Jews were innately immoral; materialistic and not spiritual; engaged in the most egregious acts of cruelty in interacting with gentiles; were parasites who avoided productive labor, amassing wealth through financial manipulation, whether as bankers, big merchants, or small shopkeepers; and were the primary sponsors of British imperialism, controlling a vast colonial empire extending across the globe. Like the white neo-fascists, the NOI was, and has always been, fiercely anti-Zionist. It also argued that contemporary Jews were not related to biblical Jews but were imposters, a view also advanced by Henry Ford and his chief lieutenant William Cameron, and by many white antisemites on the far right during the 1930s and 1940s. Like the white neo-fascists, the NOI has long distributed the Protocols and other antisemitic documents endorsed by Germany’s Nazi Party, such as Martin Luther’s The Jews and Their Lies. The Protocols had influenced Hitler in writing Mein Kampf.
It is likely that members of the NOI learned of these publications in the course of their interactions with the white neo-fascists in the late 1930s and during World War II. Beginning in 1938, Coughlin’s weekly Social Justice published the Protocols in installments. It was available for purchase at Christian Front meetings, along with other antisemitic works that Nazi Germany’s publishing outlet, Flanders Hall, distributed in the United States.
With the NOI drawing increasing media attention, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) executive secretary Roy Wilkins in 1958 compared it to the black supremacists during World War II, who promoted Japan’s and Germany’s military effort against the United States and Britain in Harlem and in African American districts in other American cities. These pro-Axis agitators, known as “Black Fuehrers,” “Black Hitlers,” and “Harlem Nazis,” forged strong ties with white neo-fascist groups, and often spoke at their wartime rallies. The Black Fuehrers shared the white neo-fascists’ hatred of Jews and their commitment to racial purity, disagreeing only on which race was superior. Similarly, during World War II, the NOI backed the Axis war effort. Beginning in 1954, one of Harlem’s most prominent wartime Black Fuehrers, Carlos Cooks, worked with Malcolm X—by the late 1950s the NOI leader best known to the public—and sometimes joined him on the podium. In August 1942, Cooks had been sentenced to ninety days in the workhouse for creating a disturbance in Harlem shouting “praises of Hitler,” and during World War II, Cooks published “a sheet called ‘The Street Speaker’,” which Chicago Defender columnist John Robert Badger described as “violently pro-Fascist” and “anti-Semitic.”
For the Black Fuehrers, antisemitism and hatred of the British were intertwined, because they believed that Jews controlled the British Empire—in their view the world’s most dangerous predatory menace. During the early years of World War II, until his arrest for sedition in 1942, Jamaican-born Robert Jordan, the Black Fuehrer who received the most press attention, delivered regular Sunday night street-corner harangues celebrating the Axis cause in Harlem, to crowds the police estimated at no more than 200. He also conducted regular indoor meetings, under the auspices of the Ethiopian-Pacific League (EPL), which he had organized in 1935 to express African American support for Japan’s war effort against China. At that time, he “proudly wired Hitler” to inform him that “the Negro people were with him in his fight against injustice.” With the onset of World War II, the EPL focused its energies on backing the Axis war effort in both the Pacific and European theaters. According to New York’s African American weekly, the Amsterdam News, Jordan “dreamed of an Africa ruled by twenty million American Negroes under the benevolent protection of Japan, after the Rising Sun Empire had conquered all Asia and overridden the United States.”
John Roy Carlson, who spent four years under cover (1939-1943) investigating America’s “Nazi Underworld,” emphasized the similarity of the propaganda “the white and black fascists” disseminated during World War II—pro-Axis and antisemitic. Their only disagreement was over which was the superior race—whites or blacks. Carlson attended EPL meetings in Harlem, and heard many of Robert Jordan’s street-corner speeches. Carlson reported that “time and again Jordan evoked loud cheering” from African Americans in attendance “at the mention of Hitler’s name,” and when he praised the “Japanese brothers” fighting American and other Allied forces in the Pacific. During the early years of World War II, before U.S. entry, the Japanese Library of Information in Manhattan provided Jordan with stacks of Axis propaganda to distribute in Harlem.
Jordan maintained that African Americans were an Asiatic people like the Japanese, whom he claimed had once been black. The NOI similarly considered blacks Asian, claiming that they had ruled the world from that continent for trillions of years before entering Africa. When Malcolm X registered with the Selective Service in 1953, claiming to be a conscientious objector, he recorded his “country of citizenship” as “Asia.”
Carlson described Jordan as “violently anti-British and anti-Semitic,” a demagogue who “repeated the Nazi mouthings that the British Empire was ruled by International Jews.” Jordan told Carlson that, “Hitler has opened my eyes. I believe in his idea of racial purity.” He boasted of having met with Hitler in Germany between February and September 1940, and presented himself as the Nazi leader’s ambassador in the United States. The New York Herald Tribune reported that the African American audiences at Jordan’s speeches “went into a frenzy whenever [he] mentioned Hitler’s name,” rising from their seats to shout “Heil Hitler!” Jordan considered the Japanese the “master race” of East Asia. Jordan told African American servicemen in Harlem on furlough that the Japanese were sure to defeat the Allies, and that the EPL was “just waiting to put [U.S. General Douglas] MacArthur into the hole in the ground where he belongs.” He told the servicemen that rather than fight the Japanese, they should “turn their guns the other way.”
Jordan’s view that Jews controlled the British Empire, rooted in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, won him approval from the white neo-fascists. They agreed that the Jews, as part of their scheme to achieve world domination, had taken charge of the West’s largest colonial system. Jewish bankers had already established an “economic dictatorship” in the West that was “more pitilessly cruel than the dictatorship of any Hitler.” By dismantling the British Empire, Japan could thwart the Jews’ nefarious plot. Both of the leading Axis powers—not only Germany, bent on conquering Britain, but Japan as well—were therefore waging a total war against the Jews. In 1940, the leader of Boston’s Christian Front, Francis Moran, claimed that in England, “Jewish infiltration in positions of power has been made almost complete.” Jews had acquired through inheritance or marriage most of the important positions in the British nobility. There was “not one Gentile director on the governing board of the Bank of England.” The “head of the English army” was Jewish.
Moran saw the Jews’ sinister hand directing China’s military resistance to Japan’s invasion. Not only was Japan fighting Communism, a Jewish-controlled movement, but Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese army was led by Jewish generals who had assumed Chinese names. General Ma’s real name was Morris Cohen, who was a New York gunman and bootlegger. Moran had ascertained that another of Chiang’s generals with a Chinese name was really a Jew named Guggenheimer.
Like the Black Fuehrers and the NOI, after Pearl Harbor the Christian Front continued to oppose the Allied war effort against Japan. On March 16, 1942, Coughlin’s newspaper, Social Justice, reprinted its August 4, 1941 editorial explaining that Japan’s policy of “Asia for the Asiatics” was “nothing more than the expression of our Monroe Doctrine.” It predicted that U.S. entry into the Pacific War would be the end of American Constitutional government, and bring God’s wrath down on the nation.
Jordan forged close ties not only with the Christian Front but also with the Christian Mobilizers, which had split off from the Front and whose rhetoric was even more violent. Anti-fascists nicknamed the Christian Mobilizers “Commander,” Joe McWilliams, “Joe McNazi.” Emulating the Nazis, both the Christian Front and the Christian Mobilizers aggressively picketed Jewish stores while shouting antisemitic epithets. These relationships foreshadowed those the NOI developed with the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party in the early 1960s. Jordan addressed Christian Front meetings as well as those of Italian Fascists in New York. John Roy Carlson first met Jordan in September 1940 at the campaign headquarters of William Goodwin, the Christian Front’s candidate for mayor of New York. Jordan told Carlson that Christian Front leader John Eoghan Kelly had “highly commended his work” in Harlem, and that the EPL was backing Goodwin’s campaign. Christian Mobilizers activist Joseph Hartery regularly addressed Jordan’s indoor meetings in Harlem. Hartery was a particularly crude antisemite, who at a New York street rally in July 1939 denounced a Jewish judge as “a hooked-nosed kike” and claimed that “half the bench was made up of hooked-nosed kikes.” More than half a century later, one of the NOI’s highest officials, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, used language almost identical to Hartery’s when referring to Jews in his campus lectures.
By September 1942 African American undercover agents, working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the police, had gathered sufficient information for a grand jury to indict for sedition Robert Jordan and three other Harlem EPL “Black Nazis”—the Rev. Ralph Best, Lester Holness, and James Thornhill, all West Indians, along with Joseph Hartery, a white Christian Mobilizers activist and close Jordan ally. They had conspired, on behalf of the Axis, to “destroy the morale and unity of the [U.S.] armed forces.” The arrests broke up the EPL in Harlem. About the same time, eighty-four pro-Axis members of black separatist organizations, including Elijah Muhammad and other NOI leaders, were arrested in Chicago on sedition and draft evasion charges. The Chicago Defender announced that the FBI had been unraveling “an international web of Nippon spy intrigue extending from Tokyo to Chicago’s South Side and New York’s Harlem.” Many of those arrested were accused of urging African Americans to refuse induction into the U.S. military and of advising black U.S. army soldiers to defect to the Japanese. The informants also reported that defendants had publicly praised Hitler, made vicious antisemitic statements, and predicted that the defeat of American and Allied forces was inevitable. NOI leaders had told African Americans that the Japanese would supply them with guns and ammunition to “drive the white devils into the sea.” The NOI had taught from its inception that white people were “devils” capable only of evil behavior, because they were the descendants of a demonic race created by a malevolent scientist with a Jewish name, Yacub, 6,000 years ago.
The Amsterdam News strongly backed prosecuting the EPL activists, blasting them in an editorial as “gibberish-speaking nitwits.” The editorial ridiculed the defendants’ claim that the Japanese were “liberators of colored people,” pointing to their brutal treatment of the Asians they had conquered. It emphasized that, “pro-Japanese propaganda is pro-slavery propaganda.” To the Amsterdam News’s delight, in January 1943, Jordan and the other Harlem defendants were convicted of conspiracy and sedition and received sentences ranging from ten years in prison for Jordan (plus a $10,000 fine) to eight years for Thornhill, seven years for Holness, six years for Hartrey, and four years for Best. The jury included three African Americans, one of whom was the foreperson.
During World War II anti-fascists considered Chicago, where the NOI was strongest, to be a major center of the far right. It was Elijah Muhammad’s base briefly in the mid-1930s and from 1942 until his death in 1975. The anti-fascist bulletin Propaganda Battlefront, published by the Friends of Democracy, reported that antisemitic neo-fascists staged meetings “almost nightly,” at least into mid-1943. Joe McWilliams and Gerald L. K. Smith, a Henry Ford protégé and after the war arguably America’s most famous antisemite before Farrakhan, were regular speakers. Like the Black Fuehrers in New York, the NOI contributed significantly to the pervasive antisemitic and defeatist sentiment in wartime Chicago.
African Americans working undercover provided the court trying the Chicago defendants with evidence that they had praised Adolf Hitler and Japanese premier Tojo as the saviors of African Americans, and had made such statements as, “our prayers were answered by the bombing of Pearl Harbor.” Emmanuel Mohammed (Lenzie Kerrien), whom the Chicago Defender called one of the top two NOI leaders under Elijah Muhammad, upon being sentenced to five years in prison for sedition, told the court: “I hope the Japs win the war.” In June 1943, the government dropped sedition charges against Elijah Muhammad because he was already serving time in prison for draft evasion, having been sentenced on that charge in late 1942.
In November 1942, David Jones, Elijah Muhammad’s lieutenant in Washington DC, went on trial there for draft evasion and for agitating against the U.S. war effort. Jones’s trial followed immediately the same court’s conviction of Elijah Muhammad for draft evasion. An African American policeman working undercover inside the NOI testified that Jones had described how the Japanese would “exterminate” the white “devils,” using “a huge stratosphere ship” containing a “fleet of planes” that were “capable of dropping bombs with a destruction radius of fifty miles.” This is known in the NOI as the “Mother Wheel,” which to this day it claims was built by black scientists in Japan for the purpose of annihilating all whites in the United States and Britain on some day in the near future. The Mother Wheel was to target Britain because it issued the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, promising to support the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.
The NOI’s virulent antisemitism facilitated its efforts in the post-World War II decades to cooperate with whites on the extreme right who shared its goal of achieving racial separation and defaming Jews. The NOI shared the militant white segregationists’ view that the movement for African American civil rights was Jewish-controlled. For example, the Ohio State University student newspaper quoted NOI member Siri X’s claim that “Jews historically controlled the civil rights movement because they controlled the money.” She declared that Jews had founded and funded the NAACP, “so they controlled the agenda.” White neo-fascists argued that Jews promoted black rights to sow discord and to promote racial miscegenation. In 1948, the platform of Gerald L. K. Smith’s Christian Nationalist Party included the statement: “The organized Jew is attempting to use the American Negro to break down the influence and power of the white man’s leadership. Numerous Jewish pressure groups encourage intermarriage, mongrelization and social intermixture,” all of which the NOI denounced. In 1966, Willis Carto, leader of the extreme rightist, antisemitic Liberty Lobby, which lamented Hitler’s defeat, expressed a view similar to the NOI’s when he declared that, “the Jewish control over so-called ‘Negro’ organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League” was “complete.” Both “race-mixing organizations prosper by using the brains of Jews [and] the money of Jews.” Their head officers were only “mulatto figureheads” fronting for the Jews.
A shared belief in the Jews’ nefarious designs and ability to manipulate in part explains the talks between the NOI and the Ku Klux Klan in 1961, and the NOI’s acceptance of a donation from American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell at an NOI rally that year. After Elijah Muhammad spoke at a mass rally in Chicago in 1962, Rockwell rose and hailed him as “the Adolf Hitler of the black man.”
The postwar NOI built on the prewar effort of Harlem Black Fuehrer Carlos Cooks and other black separatists to “force enactment” of Senator Theodore Bilbo’s bill to provide federal funding to “repatriate” at least two million African Americans to Africa, introduced in the Senate in April 1939. Black separatist groups in Detroit, Chicago, and New York supported the bill, including the NOI. Black and white civil rights activists fiercely opposed the bill. Bilbo (D-Mississippi), one of Congress’s leading anti-black racists, was a coarse, outspoken antisemite. In June 1944, the New York Post reported that, “in one of the most shocking performances ever seen in the Senate, Senator Bilbo shouted attacks on Jews and Negroes” during a debate on establishing a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. Bilbo maintained that, “all the postwar policies of the [Roosevelt] administration are being shaped by that Jew in New York—Baruch!” In October 1945, Bilbo informed Jewish newspaper columnist Walter Winchell by letter that he was a “dirty scandal-mongering kike.”
In August 1941, although Bilbo had accepted the invitation of black separatists to be the principal speaker at a Marcus Garvey Day celebration in Harlem, under pressure from a coalition of New York civil rights groups that the NAACP formed for the occasion, Bilbo withdrew and Carlos Cooks substituted for him. The coalition informed the Mississippi senator by telegram that it would picket the auditorium if he appeared. The Atlanta Daily World, the nation’s only African American daily newspaper, reported that the sponsoring separatists’ “disappointment was evident” when they learned of Bilbo’s cancellation. Their “meeting went forward after mediocre fashion.”
The NOI joined with white neo-fascists and arch-segregationists in presenting contemporary Jews as imposters with no connection to the Jews of the Hebrew Bible. This claim was rooted in the notion that Jews were inherently deceitful and immoral. The NOI combined the belief that Jews were descended from Yacub’s “white devils” with viciously antisemitic images drawn from the Qur’an and the Hadith. On the white extreme right the belief was widespread that Jews (especially the Ashkenazi) had no roots in ancient Judaea but were the offspring of the Khazars, a central Asian people. Those who advanced this claim often presented the Khazars as a degenerate tribe of bandits. Proponents included Lothrop Stoddard, “the most widely read racialist of the interwar period,” and William Cameron, editor of Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent.
Antisemites often challenge the legitimacy of the state of Israel by insisting that Jews are of Khazar origin and had never resided in the Middle East. Gerald L. K. Smith, for example, used the myth of Jewish Khazar origin in his anti-Zionist polemics. In 1949, he insisted that Eastern European Jews “were of the Khazar tribe and took on the Jewish religion in the eighth century.” Eastern European Jews who immigrated to Palestine and then Israel were “not Hebrews, but of Mongol-Tatar stock.” Smith claimed that, “neither they nor their ancestors, as a people, ever lived in Palestine.” In 1967, he asserted that “The ‘Jews’ are usurpers of the name Jew,” and that “most of the so-called Jews in the world are descendants of the Khazars.”
Many in the NOI who depicted Jews as white devils also maintained they were Khazars, and were instrumental in introducing the bizarre claim to black nationalist students, among whom it won vocal support on some campuses. At the University of California at Los Angeles, the entertainment editor of the black student magazine, Nommo, in June 1991 combined the NOI’s claim that contemporary white Jews were descended from Yacub’s white devils, banished to the “caves of Europe” for their evil behavior, with the Khazar origin myth, castigating “cave-dwelling (Khazar mountains, to be exact) white Zionist fucks.”
Some prominent arch-segregationists similarly argued that Jews were imposters with no connection to the land of Israel. J. B. Stoner, a Theodore Bilbo protégé, who helped found the militant racist and antisemitic National States Rights Party (NSRP) in 1958, published a work entitled Christ Was Not a Jew and Jews Not God’s Chosen People with the NSRP’s press, Thunderbolt. Like the NOI, the NSRP was virulently anti-Zionist, and served as a conduit into the American Nazi Party for several of its most prominent members, including “Fuehrer” George Lincoln Rockwell. It resurrected Bilbo’s repatriation plan (which it wanted to make compulsory), and also called for the forced deportation of Jews. Stoner, a former Ku Klux Klan organizer, maintained that Jews directed and controlled the civil rights movement, using African Americans as their pawns to destabilize the United States as a step toward taking it over. In a white racist inversion of the NOI’s demonology, Stoner and other NSRP leaders described Jews as descended from Satan. Like the NOI, the NSRP distributed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It saw the Federal Bureau of Investigation as promoting racial integration, and thus referred to its agents as “New York Jews.”
The NOI’s accusation that Jewish shopkeepers in black neighborhoods were “bloodsuckers,” a term that Farrakhan and other NOI leaders frequently hurled at Jews, had been employed by white neo-fascists for decades. The charge evoked the medieval blood libel, which had sparked many pogroms over the centuries. In a lecture to a large Christian Front meeting in Boston in 1940, Francis Moran described Jews as loan sharks, driven by insatiable greed to lend money at exorbitant interest rates. In 1967, Gerald L. K. Smith reported approvingly that, “what is called ‘anti-Semitism’ is growing rapidly among Negroes.” He explained that this was “because most of the merchants and hockshop owners and high charging agents of usury in the ghettoes are Jews.” In 1990, a Yale Daily News columnist, denouncing the black student-run Journal of Law and Liberation‘s invitation to NOI “national spokesman” Abdul Alim Muhammad to speak on campus, reported that the NOI’s Final Call had stated: “The Jewish shopkeepers and merchants say ‘Ho, ho, ho” as they leave the [black] community with money bags fat with our dollars.”
The NOI has emulated the white neo-fascists in promoting Holocaust denial. Gerald L. K. Smith repeatedly denied that the Holocaust had occurred. In her study of Holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt reported that The Cross and the Flag carried an article stating that the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust were really alive and in the United States. She noted that American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell made the same claim. In 1967, Smith declared in The Cross and the Flag that the Holocaust was “the biggest lie in history,” a “Jew invented fabrication.” He claimed it was actually the Germans who had been the victims of mass slaughter, killed en masse by Allied bombing. Using an argument that the NOI also advanced, the article asked, “how could six million Jews be destroyed in Germany [sic] when, at the beginning of the war, there were only 400,000 [sic] altogether?” Lipstadt noted that the “confluence between anti-Israel, antisemitic, and Holocaust denial forces was exemplified by a world anti-Zionist conference scheduled for Sweden in November 1992.” Joining NOI leader Louis Farrakhan as the announced speakers were notorious Holocaust deniers Robert Faurisson, David Irving, and Fred Leuchter. The Swedish government canceled the conference “at the last minute.” Like the NOI, contemporary neo-Nazis like David Duke, whose views of blacks resemble J. B. Stoner’s, also deny the Holocaust.
Minister of Information—One of a Kind?
On November 29, 1993, Khalid Muhammad, Minister of Information of the Nation of Islam, delivered a 3-hour address at Kean College in Union, New Jersey, in which he characterized Jews as “the bloodsuckers of the black nation,” just as they had been of the German nation. He observed that “everybody always talk about Hitler exterminating six million Jews, but don’t nobody ever ask what did they do to Hitler? … They went in there, … the way they do everywhere they go, and they supplanted, they usurped….” In short, while Hitler “was wickedly great,” the Jews “are wickedly great too, brother. Everywhere they go … they always do it and hide their head”—deny and disguise what they do.
Alerting his rapt audience to the hidden power of the Jews all over America, he divulged that, “we found out that the Federal Reserve ain’t really owned by the federal government …. It’s owned by the Jews.” The NOI recognized the connection when it observed that the Fed was located next to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Only, it isn’t. Still, the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, which makes paper money, is!
Khalid also exposed the power of the Jews by decoding their names—”Reubenstein,” “Goldstein,” “Silverstein,” teaching that Jews have those names “because you been stealing rubies and gold and silver all over the Earth.” “We call it jewelry, but … it’s Jew-elry, ’cause you’re the rogue that’s stealing all over the face of the planet Earth,” getting rich by robbing the black people of Africa and the United States.
Throughout his talk, Khalid Muhammad referred to “so-called Jews”—explaining that those who call themselves Jews are only “imposter Jews,” whose ignoble origins the NOI has uncovered. “That old no-good Jew … that old hook-nose, bagel-eatin’, lox-eatin'” Jew is only one of the “Johnny-come-lately, perpetratin’-a-fraud Jews, who just crawled out of the hills of Europe just a little over 4,000 years ago.” At a time when black Africa had great scientists and universities, the Jews were “crawl[in’] around on all fours … eatin’ Juniper roots and eatin’ each other.” In a videotape he often peddled, “The White Woman is a Bitch and a Two-Legged Dog,” he elaborated on the genetic roots of whites and Jews—the result of copulation with “the canine, their favorite animal.”
Notably, a nativity scene adorned the fliers advertising his talk, in which he promised to expose the hidden history of Jews. His sermon would make the lesson clear—the Jews had killed Jesus because he was revealing their ignominious origins, and the Jews were plotting the crucifixion of the more recent black saviors as well, as they uncover the truth—especially about the “Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews.”
In a full-page ad in the January 16, 1994 New York Times, the Anti-Defamation League reprinted excerpts from the talk—and the speech, the speaker, and the college quickly became infamous, gaining national renown. But even before the ADL ad appeared, local commentators responded by questioning the quality of instruction at the school and threatening its funding. In a column entitled “Kean College Forfeits Rights to Funds, Teach,” the education editor of the Newark Star-Ledger pointedly asked: “What sort of admission standards does it have? What sort of essay is required in its college application—describe the benefits of genocide? … Just what is taught at Kean College? … And what sort of college produces students who cheer on the insanity of mass murder?”
Commentators’ outrage was also fueled by many students’ strong defense of the performance of the Minister of Information, whom they uniformly called “Dr.,” although he had never completed college. To be sure, he was introduced as “a professor of African Studies at Cal State, Long Beach,” although the school denied that he ever taught, or worked, there. The assistant treasurer of the Student Organization, Al-Kareem Ismail, who took “full responsibility” for inviting the Minister, insisted “on several occasions” that he will invite him to speak again. Students at Kean College, often self-identified as black, shrugged off any complaints, one stating categorically, “Everything he said had a foundation in truth.” “Jewish people control all the money in the United States—that’s true, that’s not being prejudiced.” A few, who had attended the talk, pronounced it “inspirational.” Khalid was simply “a black man talking up for his race.” Overhearing the comments, a Jewish student, “with narrowing eyes,” retorted, “I don’t see how you can find his words inspirational when 95 percent of it was vicious lies.” Others noted that some of his “vicious lies” found support in Henry Ford’s The International Jew, sold by Khalid’s supporters at the talk.
A number of black activists on campus embraced Khalid as a pioneer of the promised multicultural curriculum that would liberate African American students from their “mental bondage.” An editorial in the student newspaper celebrated “Dr. Muhammad’s” speech as sounding “the beginning of a revolution” in which “the battle cry is academic inclusion” and “the weapons are … charismatic leaders.” Another supporter of the minister expressed his fury because, “When the students of color are challenged with scholarly activity [such as by] Dr. Muhammad, we are always threatened to be stopped,” and he derided those “who are quick to denounce every black scholar who says something that opposing groups deem antisemitic.” Another African American student activist simply attributed the protests of Jewish faculty who attended the event to their having “realized they could not challenge the speaker because of their own lack of knowledge and ability,” and so “like cowards,” they “went to the press” and complained of antisemitism.
Responding to widespread pressure to disavow the inflammatory speech of his Minister of Information, Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam since 1977, at a press conference on February 3, 1994, announced that he had (temporarily) removed Khalid as his national assistant. Explaining his decision, he stressed, “While I stand by the truths that he spoke, I must condemn in the strongest terms the manner in which those truths were represented.” That is, Farrakhan objected only to the “mean-spirited” manner in which his aide spoke those “truths,” because it is “against the spirit of Islam.” Still, on February 27, at the annual celebration of Saviour’s Day, the holiest day of the NOI year, commemorating the birth of its founder, Fard Muhammad, whom the Nation believes to be the Mahdi, the supposedly disavowed assistant was seated grandly in the front row. Informing the 10,000 in attendance that, “I had to rebuke him because I want him to be the great statesman he was born to be,” Farrakhan addressed Khalid’s characterization of Jews as “bloodsuckers.” “I didn’t say it, Khalid did. Did he lie?” “No,” came the crowd’s deafening response.
Despite the silencing and upbraiding, few schools canceled his engagements, and Khalid maintained a hectic schedule, speaking frequently to students and organizations for substantial ($10,000 – $15,000) fees. In Baltimore on February 19, speaking at a rally sponsored by a black women’s cultural organization, he vowed never to apologize to Jews for his Kean College talk. “I will never apologize to this bastard—never. I want to see my enemy on his back, whining, crying, … begging for mercy. No mercy here.” To the crowd’s cheers and applause, he continued, “Never will I say I am not an antisemite. Whatever he [the ‘imposter Jew’] is, Goddamn it, I’m against him …. I pray that God will kill my enemy and take him off the face of the planet Earth.” Reminding the crowd that, “I called them bloodsuckers,” he swore, “I’m not going to change that …. I am a truth terrorist. I am a knowledge gangster …. You better watch out.” Earlier, on February 9, addressing a “largely black audience” at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he described himself as “a pit bull with its jaws locked on its prey,” and assured them he would never be “muzzled.” Using the same image of himself, he promised 2,000 cheering Howard University students, “That is the way I am going to be against the Jews” and later ominously warned Jewish organizations to “leave us alone.”
Foundation Truths
Yet the message that Khalid delivered, which elicited such excitement and outrage, featured the same “Truths” the Nation’s leaders had preached from its earliest years. Central to the teaching of Messenger Elijah Muhammad, head of the NOI from 1933 until his death in 1975, who had been instructed by Fard, “Allah in human form,” was the narrative of the “imposter Jews.” Entrusted with the Original Scriptures, “written in Arabic,” Jews had from the beginning gravely distorted them, making them appear to justify their wicked goal of dominating the world. Having falsified the most sacred of texts, the “so-called Jews” continued to rely often on “deceit” in their stealthy pursuit of their “blessed” mission. Malcolm X, who formally joined the NOI in 1952 upon his release from prison (having served six-and-a-half years of a ten-year sentence), and who became its leading spokesperson, “money-maker,” and heir-apparent until his stormy break with Elijah and the organization in March 1964, elevated the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to the members’ essential “reading list.” Elaborating on the message of his mentor and beloved father figure, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X regularly blasted those who call themselves Jews as the major “bloodsuckers,” “hypocrites”—”Pharisees”—preying on the “so-called Negroes of America.” Although he identified all whites as “devils” by nature, he often singled out “the Jews” as “one of the worst of the devils.”
Even in the last few weeks of his life, before he was assassinated on February 21, 1965, as he began to inch his way from a racial, toward a class, analysis of behavior, he continued to portray the Jews as the central exploiters of black people. Still clinging to the dogma of the Nation and the Protocols, Malcolm X now drew his followers’ attention to the new target of the Jewish vultures. Near the end of the nineteenth century—around the time of the First Zionist Congress—as England and France, the traditional colonial powers, witnessed the “awakening” of the sub-Saharan “African masses” and recognized that the era of imperialist rule by “force and fears” was nearing its end, they passed the torch to the Jews—the Zionists—who would rule the emerging nations through subterfuge. It was they who would perfect the new, well-“camouflaged” form of colonialism.
By the late 1950s, many commentators had begun to acknowledge the power and the reach of “the movement.” A black journalist observed that, “[Elijah] Muhammad cannot be laughed at as Father Divine has been” and concluded that he “has captured the imagination of a segment of the suppressed and inarticulate Negro masses as few things have since Marcus Garvey.” Elijah disseminated his message through his sermons at NOI temples, his weekly radio programs heard in numerous cities across the country, his regular columns in the Pittsburgh Courier and other black newspapers, and beginning in 1960, the NOI’s own Muhammad Speaks. Similarly, large numbers of New York’s “vast black underclass” were rivetted by the speeches of Malcolm X, “a fearsome … orator,” who regularly presided over rallies near his Mosque No. 7 in Harlem. Many black youths were observed “mimicking” his swagger and dynamic, fearless speaking style. But unlike Elijah, Malcolm X’s appeal extended far beyond the “sidewalk Negroes.” Invited to lecture at colleges and universities across the country, he electrified a significant swath of black (and white) middle-class youth with his elaborations on NOI doctrine. At Harvard in 1961, “a record-breaking crowd” packed the school’s “largest auditorium … to overflow capacity.” Malcolm X was also frequently interviewed on television, which, his close aide Charles Kenyatta later reported, “really destroyed him.” “He got drunk off it. He used to sit … and watch himself, and you could see how much he liked it.” The coverage was never sufficiently positive, however, and Malcolm X complained that Negroes—and Muslims—should never “expect fair treatment from [the] white press, radio and TV since they are all controlled by Zionists.”
Indeed, Khalid Muhammad’s tirades were virtually indistinguishable from Malcolm X’s speeches delivered over thirty years before. Again and again, drawing on unmistakable, hoary antisemitic tropes, Malcolm X caricatured Jews as parasites, extracting their pound of flesh from the innocent, unsuspecting black people. He roused his minions with vivid images of all the usurious Jewish shopkeepers in their neighborhoods who are “robbing you deaf, dumb and blind.” “It’s Jews that run these run-down stores that sell you bad food.” It was Jews who were poisoning them. Committed to developing an independent black economy, the NOI was distressed that blacks, when given a choice, appeared to prefer the whites’ or Jews’ stores.
“It’s Jews right here in Harlem,” Malcolm X railed, “that run these whiskey stores that get you drunk.” Here he drew not only on NOI doctrine, but also on the revelations of the Protocols, which divulged that this was a means favored by the Elders of Zion in their drive to control the nations and the workers of the world. Indeed, Malcolm X even revealed the precise extent of the Jews’ reach, which the Jewish media kept hidden. He informed Kenneth Clark, professor of psychology at City College of New York, that Jews “control 90 percent of the businesses in every Negro community from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” Or, as he stated flatly to another interviewer, “When there’s something worth owning, the Jews got it.”
To the crowds he attracted on the campuses and the streets, Malcolm X pictured the Jewish merchants—and Jewish absentee landlords—craftily fleeing every night after dark “with another bag of money drained out of the ghetto.” Worse, the Jews “sap the very lifeblood of the so-called Negroes to maintain the state of Israel.” “Israel,” he explained, “was just another poorhouse which is maintained by money sucked from the poor suckers in America.” Notably, in the black uprisings in New York and Philadelphia in the mid-1960s, rioters “plundered Jewish stores” and left untouched shops where “hastily hung signs” announced, “This is a Christian store.”
Years later, Louis Farrakhan, an acolyte of Malcolm X—who modeled his “walk and talk” after him because he “was the baddest thing I’d ever seen”—tried to rouse his audience with a depiction of “Koreans” as the new “colonizers” of the black community. They take “the money that you give them, … [but] they won’t put their money in our bank. They take [your] money and put it in their bank,” where “you can’t get a loan, even though the money that they got in their bank is from your community.” But unlike the indictment of the Jewish “bloodsuckers,” this accusation fell flat, could develop no traction. The reason for the contrast was clear. As Malcolm X had explained, “All white people who have studied history and geography know that Christ was a black man.” It was the racial descendants of those who crucified Jesus who had been bleeding and betraying black men ever since. Or, as Farrakhan assured his audience, “Jewish people don’t have no hands that are free from the blood of us.”
Apologists for students who wildly cheered Khalid, Malcolm X, Farrakhan—and their protégés—arguing that they were only applauding their message of “black uplift,” had missed the point. NOI speakers endlessly stressed that it was the Jews who had economically crippled the black masses—and liberation and uplift meant releasing them from their iron grip. Much like Hitler, whom the NOI leaders often identified as “a very great man,” they called for their nation—the black nation—to be Judenrein.
Khalid Muhammad also instructed his audiences about the duplicity of Jews in the civil rights movement, confiding, “The so-called Jews have told us …. ve, ve were on the front lines of the civil rights marches. Ve have always supported you. But …. the so-called Jews, what they have actually done, brothers and sisters, is used us as cannon fodder.” Here too, Khalid was only echoing the teachings and contempt Malcolm X had voiced over three decades before, and that Farrakhan had repeated again and again. Indeed, Khalid had learned the lesson well, as Malcolm X had explained that, “the Jew played these roles [in the civil rights movement] for a very careful strategic reason: the more prejudice in America could be focused upon the Negro, the more the white Gentiles’ prejudice would be diverted off the Jew.” (In fact, their involvement in the movement intensified antagonism toward ‘the Jew.’)
Separation and the independence of the “black nation” had always been at the core of NOI ideology—with integration identified only as a ruse intended to deflect blacks from their proper goal. Besides, Malcolm X averred, why “integrate with a sinking ship”—”God is about to eliminate that particular race from this Earth.” Still, Malcolm X informed Klansmen with whom he met in 1961, “The Jew is behind the integration movement, using the Negro as a tool”—which, to be sure, the Klan already knew. In 1959, as the integration movement gathered steam, Malcolm X had determined that the Jew—the duplicitous Jew—”poses as being a friend,” but “does more to take advantage of the so-called black people than any other.” Four years later, he expanded on the methods of the devious, self-interested Jew: “The Jew is always anxious to advise the black man …. The Jew that’s advising the Negro joins the NAACP, CORE [Congress of Racial Equality], the Urban League and others. With money donations, the Jew gains control, then he sends the black man doing all this wading in, boring in, … everything but buying in …. Never advises him how to own what he wants. No, when there’s something worth owning, the Jew’s got it.” He observed that the Jews never tried to “solve their problem … [by] sitting-in and crawling-in and sliding-in … like he teaches the Negro to do.” When hotels barred Jews, they “pooled their money and bought the hotels …. They bought Atlantic City and Miami Beach and anything else they wanted. Who owns Hollywood?” But the wily promise of the integration movement was only that blacks “will be able to sit down and drink some coffee with some crackers in a cracker restaurant.”
To Malcolm X, the Jews, who had perfected the art of deceit—or, in the NOI neologism, the science of “tricknology”—joined and subsidized the civil rights organizations in order to “control and contain the Negro’s struggle,” subverting the revolt of the “downtrodden black masses” here in “the last stronghold of white supremacy.” It was the Jews who generally selected, financed and elevated the “Uncle Tom leaders” of the civil rights movement, who represented only “the Black Bourgeoisie”—a favorite negative epithet of the NOI—”the already brainwashed, white-minded, middle-class minority, … seeking to lose their ‘black identity’ by mixing, mingling, intermarrying, and integrating with the white man.” Indeed, the NOI shared with the Klan a powerful aversion to interracial sex, which Malcolm X associated with the integration movement—often expressing his disgust that “most of [‘these integration leaders’] are either married to or hooked up with some white woman.” These “‘leaders’ sell out our people for just a few crumbs of token recognition, … token victories and token progress.” The Jews and these “token leaders” ignite “artificial fires” in a “desperate” attempt to thwart “the Black Revolution” that has already “swept white supremacy out of Africa, out of Asia,” and is “now manifesting itself … among the black masses in this country.” Thus, to Malcolm X, the March on Washington (August 28, 1963), “infiltrated” by “hypocritical” “white leaders” who derailed it, preventing it from being an expression of “militant, angry, impatient, black” demands, became “a picnic, … a farce, with clowns.” He suggested awarding “Oscars for the best production, best acting, and best supporting cast (the Negroes) of the century.”
Louis Farrakhan’s position on the role of Jews in the civil rights movement was identical to that of Malcolm X. Having long taught that the hypocritical Jews were consumed only with “their selfish desires,” in 1994 he told a receptive crowd, “It shouldn’t make you keel over to learn the Jews latched onto our civil rights movement to further their interests.” The same year, speaking at Malcolm X Park in Washington, DC, he warned African Americans, “If we get a good leader, don’t look to Jews to support them.” And when he asked them, “What should be done with black leaders who seek Jewish support?” and the response came, “Kill them!” Farrakhan agreed, “I didn’t say it. I just seconded the motion!” The next year, explaining that “Jews know their wickedness,” he again warned his audience: “I intend to raise the ante tonight! Black people will not be controlled by Jews. Black leaders will either come out for us—or get the hell away from us. Who is your master—God or Jewish leaders”—God or the Satanic Jews? The Million Man March, organized by the NOI and presided over by Farrakhan, staged in Washington DC on October 16, 1995, over 30 years after the March on Washington, and open only to black men—no Jews or white liberals allowed—and with numerous antisemitic screeds on display the night before—was intended to be the Nation’s response to the earlier “picnic.”
Khalid Muhammad had learned the canon well, and his venomous professions about the Jews and the Holocaust were almost verbatim renderings of the teachings of Malcolm X. Not only did Khalid instruct students that the Jews of Germany were to blame for the Holocaust, but in May 1994, he assured a large, “mostly black, audience” in Los Angeles that “the black holocaust is one hundred times worse than any other holocaust,” or as he had earlier intoned, “the holocaust was nothing.” Thirty years before, Malcolm X was equally dismissive as he conjured up images of manipulative Jews, “always running around here trying to get you sympathetic for them … make you cry crocodile tears over what happened to him in Germany.” (NOI speakers almost always confine the Holocaust to Germany.) “You haven’t got no time to cry no tears for no Jew,” Malcolm X railed. “Why, … only 6 million Jews were killed by Hitler. Uncle Sam killed 100 million black people, bringing them here, yeah 100 million, 100 million. Don’t let no Jew get up in your face and make you cry for him.” He informed his credulous listeners, “One hundred million of us were kidnapped and brought to this country—100 million. Now everybody’s getting wet-eyed over a handful of Jews…. What about our 100 million?” Of the 100 million, he claimed that 80 million had been “murdered,” “butchered,” and “mutilated”—”and these Jews got the audacity to … want you to cry for them.”
In fact, the Atlantic slave trade involved between 10 and 12 million Africans, brought to the Western hemisphere—with 4 to 6 percent of them brought “to this country”—four hundred thousand to seven hundred twenty thousand. And the death toll in the Middle Passage has been estimated at between 1.2 and 2.6 million. Often, Malcolm X objected to any question posed to him about Jews and the Holocaust, responding, “You’re not in a position to ask me anything about the Holocaust. Nazism is practiced by this government…. The same thing that Hitler was practicing in Germany is practiced in this country against Negroes, … Negroes in general and Muslims in particular.” Despite—and often because of—the toxic ideology and malicious rhetoric, Malcolm X remained an iconic figure. Even Bill Clinton sported a jogging cap emblazoned with Malcolm’s signature “X” when he was “running” for president in 1992.
In short, the NOI stressed that the Jews were victimizers—not victims. And as Malcolm X, Khalid Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan and the NOI determined, the insidious, unrelenting grip of the Jews extended far beyond the black community. In 1985, in a rhythmic call-and-response before an electrified audience, who were certain he was revealing the Truth, Farrakhan asked: “Who runs the movie industry?” The audience, vociferously, “Jews!” “Who runs the publishing houses?” “Jews!” “Who controls the newspapers?” Audience, shouting, “the Jews!” “Who controls the banking?” Farrakhan is hammering his hand, and the audience is screaming, “Jews!” “Who controls the Federal Reserve?” Farrakhan is now jumping wildly and pointing to the Federal Reserve, apparently just off the stage—and the audience yells, “Jews!” “Who controls the government?” he shouts. “Jews!” “Yesssir. And are the people right or are the people wrong?” Like the claims of the Nazis and the white far right, the Jews owned or controlled everything. But unlike them, the NOI was certain that Allah would soon eliminate the Satanic race (and the white devils), liberating the Black Nation from their clutches at last.
Stolen Identities
The Nation of Islam’s characterizations and condemnations of Jews derive largely from the fundamental tenets of its theology, transmitted by Fard and elaborated upon by Elijah Muhammad. It was Elijah who taught Malcolm X, Farrakhan, et al. that “imposter Jews” developed and embraced the “dirty religion” they call Judaism. Adding an indelible racial twist to a basic Islamic precept, Elijah explained that the imposters “started tampering with [the] truth” of the “Divine Scripture” from the moment they received it, in the process fashioning a new “god” who endorsed their nefarious ends. This falsified testament portrays “all of its Great Prophets [as] evil, … charges Noah and Lot with drunkenness, and Lot [with] getting children by his daughter.” No wonder, Elijah commented, that Fard labeled it the “Poison Book.”
Central to the counterfeit text is the “so-called Jews'” “usurpation” of the status of the Chosen of God—stolen, the NOI contends, from “the Black Man,” “Original Man,” who had thrived (without disease) for 76 trillion years before the appearance of “the white race,” beginning with Adam and Eve. (Like the Hebrews, twelve tribes comprised the Original Black Nation—the thirteenth having been lost in the explosion that separated the moon from the Earth.) Exposing their essential—racially inscribed—”wickedness,” the imposter Jews not only concealed the identity of the “Real Children of Israel,” but redefined the blessing of God. “Altering the Word,” the doctored testament revealed that they had been Chosen to rule over—not to serve—all other nations. As Farrakhan railed again and again, “Here’s a people that stole your birthright and are running around like they are the Chosen of God, and the choice of God is sittin’ under their foot!” Although it was the NOI that had uncovered the treachery of those “who call themselves Jews,” Farrakhan reminded “my beloved Christian brothers and sisters” in his audience that “Jesus bears me witness at the truth of what I am saying.” In the “parable in the New Testament of the wicked husbandman,” Jesus excoriated the Jews for hiding the Truth that would have awakened “the Gentile Nations.” “Talkin’ to the Jews,” “Jesus said, ‘What man having the light would hide it under a bushel basket? You’ve got the light …. But you hide your light’.” Roaring, Farrakhan acted out the scene, pointing to where the imposter Jews had hidden the light they were given—under the podium, it appeared. “And the people are blind, stumbling over themselves, because you concealed the testimony.” Grinning broadly now, Farrakhan concluded, so the Gentiles—the Black People—”have been made devils.”
Elijah Muhammad also revealed the insidious methods on which the false Jews always relied in their unceasing effort to rob and subjugate the descendants of Original Man. Elijah—the Messenger of Allah—and his acolytes in the Nation pointed to the devious schemes—the “web of lies and deceit”—deployed by those who had intentionally distorted the Torah. They stressed that, as shown in their counterfeit text, these “Enemies of God” manipulated black people, fostered divisions and fighting among them, and endlessly conspired against them. The Nation claimed to have counted over 23 such conspiracies in the text—all blessed by the god that “the Jews” had fashioned in their own perfidious image.
When Malcolm X discovered the Protocols, he knew they were valid—because they adhered to the teachings of the NOI. By the end of the nineteenth century, this cabal of Jews had merely perfected the devices they had inscribed in the corrupted “Old Testament” two millennia ago—and had favored ever since. Although Malcolm X was convinced of the authenticity of the Protocols, Farrakhan disclosed that he had actually met an Elder of Zion. As he divulged in an interview with a group of Washington Post reporters, who appeared thoroughly confused, the Elder had confided how his “small clique … use their power and their knowledge to manipulate” what Farrakhan estimated at “85 percent of the masses of the people of the Earth, … against the best interest of the people.” With the exception of this fortuitous “encounter,” the Elders and their minions were determined to keep their plots hidden, of course, and therefore, the NOI contends, the so-called Jews own or control all the media. And when NOI spokespersons manage to breach the Elders’ defenses and expose the Truth they have assiduously concealed, they are immediately smeared as antisemites.
Although NOI ministers continued to adhere to the premises and principles of the original belief system, over time the emphasis changed, and the venom came to focus overwhelmingly—even singularly—on Jews as the “source of black suffering.” In Orgena—”a Negro” spelled backwards—the play Farrakhan wrote and in which he starred in 1959, “the white man,” not the Jew, was condemned for selling “whiskey and dope” to the black man. And Malcolm X often directed his rage toward Christianity, the “slavemaster’s religion,” which “promised us that we so-called Negroes would sprout wings after death and mount up into the sky where God would have a place especially prepared for us. Since we … were not to get anything … while we were alive.” He blasted “the Negro preachers” as “the biggest fools,” whose teachings kept the blacks in “the grave of … mental bondage which was dug for us to fall into by our … Christian slavemaster.” And he blamed “the Church in Rome” for “playing one of the leading roles” in the enslavement of Africans. In the 1950s-1960s, NOI ministers delivered their “passionate assault on Christianity” on Temple stages that featured a painting of a lynching, flanked on one side by an American flag and on the other by a large cross.
But Farrakhan, recognizing the persistent attachment of his potential constituents—and even the members of the NOI—to Jesus, increasingly downplayed Christianity’s responsibility for the oppression of blacks, and directed their attention to the New Testament’s animus to “the Synagogue of Satan.” He informed his audience that they had been given only “a watered-down version of the gospel” and, acknowledging that “I have some very good Christians in front of me,” described them nonetheless as “good Christian slaves.” He reminded them that “Christ overcame the world, but you singing, ‘we shall overcome—someday’—whenever that day is, I don’t know, but some day.” But he also told his audience, “You are the brother of Jesus,” who was “a black man” with “hair like lambswool and feet like burnished brass,” leading many to cheer wildly and jump up and down. Often, wagging his finger menacingly and jumping with abandon, Farrakhan recalled Paul’s teachings about the Jews: “‘They are all in rebellion’ … there are ‘none that doeth good.’ No, not one.” Overcome, he paused, before resuming: “Paul said to us that the poison of asps is under their tongue, their mouth is an open sepulcher.” Still jumping, he shouted, “So if Paul is antisemitic, then burn your bible!”
But Farrakhan wasn’t done, and he applied Paul’s insights to a journalist whom he recognized as a Jew, who had disparaged him on a television talk show: “Bernard Stone, … you have no respect for the truth. You altered the Word of God—your fathers did—now you alter my word.” Now grinning broadly, and responding to deafening applause, Farrakhan continued, “When Bernard Stone was speakin’, his mouth was an absolute tomb. The poison of asps is under his tongue”—making sure that no one missed his point about “the Satanic Jew.”
With Farrakhan leading the way, the Nation also shifted its emphasis on the meaning of the historical narrative detailed in the “Old Testament.” Cleaving to Elijah Muhammad’s teaching, Malcolm X had stressed the parallels between the experiences of the ancient Hebrews and those of the “so-called Negroes of America.” Farrakhan, however, increasingly denied the account of the Hebrews, revealing that Holy Scripture should be seen largely as prophecy about “the black people of America.” He informed “all those who feel the children of Israel are over in that place they call Israel, you are mistaken.” “The prophetic children of Israel are not living in the modern Jewish state in the Middle East, but are, in fact, the Black man and woman of America.”
Although the imposter Jews had from the beginning hidden the truth, the NOI recognized that in Isaiah, God was only addressing the “so-called Negroes of America” when He vowed: “ye shall be named the Priests of the Lord … ye shall eat the riches of the Gentiles …. For your shame ye shall have double.” They understood that Malachi was certainly addressed to them when God promised, “He would send Elijah to the lost sheep … in ‘the last days’ … to teach us the truth that would free us from our Slavemaster.” To Malcolm X, it was clear that “the 20 million Negroes in America, … our present generation, is witnessing the fulfillment of these divine prophecies in the work being done … by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” With Exodus as his guide, Malcolm X always identified Elijah as “the modern Moses,” come to liberate the “so-called Negroes” who, like the ancient Hebrews, have suffered “400 years of bondage.” The NOI always insisted that the first black slaves had landed at Jamestown in 1555, brought over, Malcolm X underscored, in a ship named Jesus, with Farrakhan finding validation of the date, as he pointed out in his address at the Million Man March, in that 1555 was a “1” placed before “the height of the Washington Monument in feet!” (To be sure, Jamestown wasn’t founded until 1607, and the first blacks arrived in 1619.) And Malcolm X stressed that, like the ancient Hebrews, for those four centuries, “so-called Negroes” have been “strangers in a strange land.”
He pointed out that today, “just as Moses in his day,” Elijah is leading America’s “poor slaves (so-called Negroes) [to] a land of their own”—the Promised Land. Always directing contempt at those who “pose as Negro ‘leaders’,” who are invariably beholden to “so-called liberals”—to so-called Jews—Malcolm X likened the Negro leaders to the “Hebrew magicians” hired by Pharaoh “to try and fool their own people into thinking they would soon be integrated into the mainstream of that country’s life.” “Even in that day”—just as today—he emphasized, “separation was God’s solution to the ‘slaves’ problems.'”
Although Farrakhan shared these views of American blacks, he increasingly taught that the biblical account of the journey and travails of the Hebrews should be understood only as prophecy about the “Real Children of Israel.” He triumphantly disclosed that, “there is no historical record of Jews in bondage in Egypt for 400 years,” no demand that Pharaoh “release the captured Israelites,” no plagues or threat of plagues, no Israelites “wandering in the desert.” Determined to replace any perception of Jews as victims with Jews as victimizers, Farrakhan accentuated that not only were the Jews not slaves—but they were the slavers of the “Real Chosen People of God.” Beginning in the mid-1980s and hammered by “the Research Department of the Nation of Islam” into the 1991 screed The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, Farrakhan and the NOI attributed “monumental culpability” for the Atlantic slave system to Jews. To be sure, scholars pointed out that the claim is a “monumental lie” and characterized the tract as only “the extreme example of anti-Semitic accusations masquerading as a documented history of Jewish involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and American slavery.” One wrote of the “sense of authorial derangement” one gets from reading the last 99 pages, which read “like the diary of a madman.” Notably, Khalid Muhammad informed Kean College students that the release of Steven Spielberg’s film Swindler’s List was just another attempt “to divert attention from Jews’ complicity in the African slave trade.”
Farrakhan and the NOI were committed to revealing all the treachery the Jews had kept “secret,” to exposing their deceit, their hypocrisy, “their wickedness.” Farrakhan announced flatly, “I know their wickedness.” Indeed, “Jews know their wickedness, not just Zionism, which is an outgrowth of Jewish transgression.” He warned “a standing-room-only crowd of 5,000” to beware—because “the wickedly wise … are working night and day to trick you out of the promise of God and take you down to hell with them because the time of their end has come!” Promising black people that “The masquerade is over!” the audience responded with a “thunderous standing ovation.”
To Farrakhan, the Jews were the embodiment of evil. In 2011 he explained that he was compelled to speak so much about the Jews because, “My job is to pull the cover off of Satan so that he will never deceive you and the people of the world again.” For Farrakhan and the NOI, the Star of David had replaced the cross as the symbol of iniquity. With a picture of a giant Star of David projected on a screen, Farrakhan vowed to his audience that he would “make it plain …. Now this Star of David … look at it … six sides … six angles …”—he dramatically counted out and traced each side and each angle. “And each angle in an equilateral triangle is how many degrees?” Aroused, the audience shouted, “60 degrees!” Farrakhan, grinning broadly: “Say it loud! Well, you have 6, 6, and 6. So the bible says, ‘Count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man—600, 3 score, and 6.'” Through his close reading of the Book of Revelation, he had “deciphered the [real] meaning of the symbol adopted by Jews and Zionists.” It was imperative that his audience recognize that the Star of David “was not used during the time of … the early Israelite prophets,” before the so-called Jews began to falsify the holy Torah, rejecting the word of God, becoming the agents of Satan, creating and “teaching a body of knowledge that would make a devil.” It is the symbol of the so-called Jews who usurped the birthright of the Original People, enslaved their descendants, and who continue to ensnare the “True Children of Israel.”
Excoriating an audience of African Americans in 1985, who responded by screaming, cheering, and clapping, Farrakhan raged, pointing at them:
Liars and thieves, you! Murderers and gamblers and … freaks and fornicators and adulterers! This is you, my own flesh and blood. You have been made devils…. Coke-usin’, reefer-smokin’, pill-poppin’, heroin-shootin’ self…. Snuff cocaine until the linin’ of your nose is burn out, your brain is busted, you enjoyin’ yourself. Committers of suicide, fratricide, genocide. Nation of devils. Because you under the rule and order of maker—made by Jews into devils. Tha’s why they don’t want me to talk. Because if I continue to speak, the Gentile nations will awaken. And if the Gentiles awaken, they’ll look at the Jew and say, ‘You did this to us.’
Yet somehow, Farrakhan startlingly—disingenuously—had objected to the “vile … mean-spirited … manner” in which Khalid expressed the truth.
Although scholars and commentators generally classify antisemitism in the United States only as a variant of the infamous European virus, the Nation of Islam developed a distinct, American brand of the world’s oldest hatred. To be sure, the NOI’s obsessive focus on Jewish omnipotence always bore some resemblance to that of American white neo-fascists, but it is overwhelmingly the spokesmen of the NOI who have been invited to deliver their message to students at elite and public colleges and universities across the country. While Henry Ford agreed in 1927 to cease publication of The International Jew, with its long excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it is the NOI, which continues to sell or distribute it wherever its speakers appear, that has brought it to the campus. And in 1999, it was Malcolm X—not Coughlin—who was honored with a postage stamp.
The Nation of Islam reformulated antisemitism by adding its own racial poison to the traditional toxic brew. Christianity always maintained that Jews did not understand their own bible—did not recognize, for example, that it foretold the coming of a new savior, very different from the messiah that Jews anticipated. Islam, by contrast, taught that the Jews had so distorted the Torah that Allah had to send the angel Gabriel to deliver the true Original Scriptures—-the Qur’an—to “the Prophet Mohammad.” Although the NOI shared Islam’s claim that the Jews corrupted the original text, it maintains that in drafting the counterfeit document the Jews intentionally transformed its racial nature. As the NOI informed African Americans, “the Book of Deuteronomy—it’s all about you!” The Nation had racialized monotheism.
Moreover, the NOI created a demonology that tied Judaism from its earliest years to Satan. It was in the medieval period that Christian theologians had begun systematically to link Jewish villainy to Satan. They discovered that Jews had Satan’s horns, his stench, his devious intellect, and invariably portrayed them mounted on Satan’s animal, the goat. The NOI, by contrast, always contended that Jews had become the principal agents of Satan from the time they falsified the Torah, obscuring the true racial identity of the Chosen of God and crafting an alleged deity that blessed their unholy mission of subjugating all the peoples of the world. The NOI explained that “Satan was given 6,000 years to rule,” which he has done through “the Satanic people,” the Jews—but reassured enraptured audiences that this era is about to end.
The NOI taught that although the Satanic Jews controlled all races, “the bloodsuckers” had focused, above all, on victimizing “the black nation.” They had stolen the birthright of Original Man; enslaved the black people; stealthily robbed the black ghettos, and deviously thwarted blacks’ reach for justice and liberation. The Jews had all black entertainers and athletes in their grasp. The National Basketball Association was a Jewish plantation. Barack Obama had been “nurtured by Jews” to be the “first Jewish president.” The NOI explained that “The Jews are telling you, ‘We own the brother.'” Their insidious goal—to “use him to trick black people away from the Promise of God”—once again.