Farrakhan the Chasid
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Forward, June 5, 1998
After spending a delightful afternoon with Minister Louis Farrakhan in his Chicago home, I can report that the leader of the Nation of Islam is actually a chasid of the Satmar sect. Or so he suggests. I consider this a scoop.
We were sitting at his immense dining room table, along with his chief of staff, Leonard Farrakhan Muhammad, who, unlike his boss, doesn’t believe that it is worth the Nation of Islam’s while to sit down with Jewish journalists. It’s not that he’s anti-Semitic, you see, it’s just that Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League will eventually get to me and order my opinions trimmed to conform to those of the ADL.
The discussion had turned to Israel when I learned of Farrakhan’s Satmar leanings. He told me he had been hoping, on his recent tour of terrorist states, to visit Israel. He was looking forward to exchanging views with the prime minister. When I expressed surprise at Minister Farrakhan’s apparent interest in constructive dialogue on the subject of Israel, he told me he harbors no ill feelings toward the Jewish state, as it is currently configured. Its creation, however, is another matter.
“I am anti-the way Israel was set up,” he explained to me. “To me the Jewish return to the Holy Land should be under the auspices of the Messiah.”
“So,” I said, “You’re actually chasidic.”
“You could say that,” Farrakhan replied. “But if the chasidics said this, nobody would say they’re anti-Semitic!”
Well, actually…
But the subject at hand is Louis Farrakhan, and his ever-changing moods.
I was invited to chat with the Rev. Farrakhan after holding extensive discussions with the good minister’s foremost Caucasian apologist, Jude Wanniski, the supply-side economist who was formerly famous for being Jack Kemp’s foremost Caucasian apologist. It is Mr. Wanniski’s controversial, and, to most Jews, insupportable, position that Minister Farrakhan is not a raving anti-Semite, but someone who has been relentlessly provoked and needled by the organized Jewish community — “political Jews,” in Mr. Wanniski’s term. In other words, the Jews made him do it.
Mr. Wanniski, who now helps draft Minister Farrakhan’s speeches — we’ve come a long way from the days when Malcolm X refused any white help for his revolution — told me that the anti-Semitic utterings of Minister Farrakhan are not, in fact, anti-Semitic at all. The poor man is the most misquoted religious figure in history.
I have covered the Nation of Islam for a while, and I understand Mr. Wanniski’s game, so I refused to play. There is no way around the anti-Semitism threaded through so many of Louis Farrakhan’s statements, including this one, delivered in 1984: Israel, he said, “will never have any peace because there can be no peace structured on injustice, lying and deceit and using the name of God to shield your gutter religion under his holy and righteous name.”
And yet, I have never been particularly frightened by Minister Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. He has a small following, he’s a poor manager, he’s never killed a Jewish person, or asked anyone else to kill a Jewish person, and he has a tendency to shoot himself in the foot whenever he appears to be moving toward respectability. Who else could gather more than half-a-million men on the National Mall, and then deliver an incomprehensible and soporific lecture on numerology? And then follow-up that lecture with victory laps in Libya and Sudan?
There’s also the matter of the “footies.” When I arrived at his Hyde Park palace for our scheduled meeting, I was frisked and then allowed to enter an anteroom. One particularly large Fruit of Islam bodyguard turned to another and said, “Could you get Mr. Goldberg some footies?”
“Footies” turn out to be the white tube socks Minister Farrakhan’s guests must wear while walking around his spotless home. It is fair to say that leaders of true fascist intent would never be caught dead allowing the word “footies” to be used in conversation. (“Goebbels, you vill vear footies in ze bunker!” See, it doesn’t work.)
Which brings up the Hitler problem. One of the reasons Minister Farrakhan wanted to see me, I think, is that I do not count myself among those in the Jewish community who believe that he is a black Hitler, on the grounds that no one but Hitler is Hitler.
I also tend, in my more naive moments, to believe two things that stray from the accepted line on Louis Farrakhan: One is that, in his more comprehensible moments, he has some interesting things to say about the conditions of black America and the failure of the multiculturalist welfare state to address those conditions. The second is that for a man who seems to despise Jews so ardently, he spends a good deal of time worrying about his relations with them.
There is no doubt in my mind that the 14-year-old dispute between Jews and the Nation of Islam has been very good for Minister Farrakhan’s public profile. But I’ve noticed, from time to time, seemingly serious efforts on his part to search for ways to exchange views with members of the Jewish community. Most of these exchanges result in mutual recrimination, but I wanted to see for myself if it were possible to talk quietly and rationally to Minister Farrakhan about Jews without watching him take a dive into the fever swamp of anti-Semitism.
I’ll answer that question in my next column. For now, let’s just say that he was a charming host.