How Do We Fight Xenophobia?

By CORNEL WEST Professor of Religion at Princeton University and author of Race Matters

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.

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.

If we are to engage in a serious dialogue about blacks and Jews, and how best to fight xenophobia, we must not cast all anti-Semitic statements as pro- Nazi ones, vilify black anti-Semites and soft-pedal white anti-Semites (or Jewish antiblack or anti-Arab racists) or overlook the role of some Jewish conservatives as defenders of policies that contribute to black social misery. We cannot proceed if we assume the worst of each other -- that the majority of black people are unreconstructed anti-Semites or that the majority of Jews are plotting conspiracies to destroy black people. I have great faith and confidence in the moral wisdom of most blacks and Jews in regard to vulgar racist bigotry -- yet our communities are shot through with more subtle forms. This is why it is incumbent upon blacks and Jews to fight all forms of xenophobia even as we try to alleviate the poverty and paranoia that feed so much despair and distrust in our time.

As for my brothers, Khallid Abdul Muhammad and Minister Louis Farrakhan, I beseech you in the precious name of the black freedom struggle and in the compassionate spirit of Islam to channel your efforts of black self-help in ways that do not mirror the worst of what American civilization has done to black people.

We rightly will not permit a double-standard treatment that casts you less than human, but we also must not allow your -- or anyone else's -- utterance to tar the black freedom struggle with the brush of immorality. For the sake of Fannie Lou Hamer, Abraham Joshua Heschel and El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz -- and those many thousands gone -- we can do no other.