‘I’m Going to Kill You, Cracker,’ And Other Greetings of the Day
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Forward, September 11, 1998
Midway through the so-called Million Youth March, a teenager, perhaps 15 years of age, brushed by me on his way to the stage. I was standing near the densely packed corner of 119th Street and Lenox Avenue, surrounded by members of the Assata Shakur Freedom Fighters, the Socialist Workers Party, the Umoja Nation, along with a seller of disposable cameras, a lone Garveyite and my friend Tamar Jacoby, the author of the recently published “Someone Else’s House,” which argues for the revival of the integrationist idea.
The 15-year-old was wearing a T-shirt that featured a photograph of Mayor Giuliani, as well as a text message, which I could not make out. I asked him what the shirt said. He responded: “He’s a cracker. He’s killing all of us. And we’re going to kill you too, you white cracker expletive.”
Well, nice to see you, too.
I turned to Tamar and noted that credit must be given: Khalid Muhammad, the dome-headed hatemonger, is the only figure in America who could lead a rally that would make Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March seem like Martin Luther King’s March on Washington by comparison.
Obscured in the debate over Mayor Giuliani’s overenthusiastic enforcement of the statutes governing parade permits is the fact that Mr. Muhammad’s rally was a festival of pathological anti-Semitism. For reasons that remain hidden to me, most of the daily newspapers covering the event have not seen fit to provide their readers with samples of this anti-Semitism. Such as the comment by one speaker, a representative of a radical Native American group (I know they’re radical because she quoted, approvingly, “Colonel Gadhafi”) who stood before the 6,000 or 7,000 people assembled in the street and said: “This is my staff. I have the scalp on it. All I need is the Jew hat.” This comment drew laughter from those around me.
There was a “minister,” David Miller, who prefaced his remarks by saying, “we assemble in Harlem in Jew York.”
And then there was the estimable Malik Zulu Shabazz, who is running for City Council in Washington, D.C. Mr. Shabazz is the man who, in 1994, led the following call-and-response at Howard University:
“Who caught and killed Nat Turner?”
“Jews!” the audience shouted back.
“Who controls the Federal Reserve?”
“Jews!”
“You’re not afraid to say it, are you?”
“Jews, Jews!”
“Who controls the media and Hollywood?”
“Jews!”
Mr. Shabazz, who was introduced to the crowd by a colleague as the “brother who gives the Jews hell on TV and in the courts,” told the crowd that “you are the chosen people of God. I don’t care what the Jews say, you are the only people who have been in bondage for 400 years. You are the chosen people, not the so-called Jew.”
He also noted that, whereas the Jews “squeeze every dime they can out of Volkswagen,” blacks have not yet received their due reparations.
Mr. Muhammad himself, in the rant he delivered just before the police shut down his rally, stated that “the Jews are bloodsuckers of the black nation, the no-good bastards,” and that the city would “never have gone to the goddamn Jew in Crown Heights and told their youth they couldn’t march down Utica Avenue.”
None of the previous quotations made it into The Washington Post’s story about the event. “The rally, while laced with angry rhetoric, focused mostly on the need for black youth to unify and take responsibility for their communities,” the account reads. “…Indeed, much of the march had a 1960s feel, with speaker after speaker asking participants to raise clenched fists in the air and cry out, ‘Black Power!’”
(Here is the way that sort of reporter might cover the rise of the Nazi party: “Though laced with angry rhetoric, much of Hitler’s recent speech in Nuremberg focused on the need to build greater self-esteem among German youth.”)
In a similar vein, New York’s Daily News reported that Mr. Muhammad “vowed to hold another march next summer in the largely Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn.”
This is a very much cleaned-up version of what Mr. Muhammad said. Actually, he threatened something akin to “taking it to the no-good Jew bastards in Crown Heights.”
I couldn’t make out the exact language he used, because just at that moment a police helicopter swooped low over Lenox Avenue, drowning out the sound of Mr. Muhammad’s voice.
Which brings us to the problem of Mr. Giuliani’s overreaction.
The rally was a filthy gathering of low-life paranoid racists, but it wasn’t, until the very end, violent. The rhetoric was terrifically violent, but it was rhetoric only, and it did not warrant the introduction of riothelmeted squadrons of police officers and swarming helicopters.
It is entirely understandable why the police might have been frightened or angry. “Look these bastards in the eye, and if anyone attacks you, already decide who will be the one to disconnect the railing where you are and beat them, no-good bastards,” Mr. Muhammad counseled his followers. And: “If any one of these bastards riots here today, you take their nightstick the way they did to brother Abner Louima and ram it up their behinds and jam it down their throats.”
Sounds like incitement to me. And yet, by filling Harlem with thousands of cops, Mr. Giuliani gave Mr. Muhammad just what he wanted. The mayor should have studied the Nation of Islam playbook. Remember that Mr. Muhammad’s spiritual leader, Louis Farrakhan, did not become famous until 1984, when he taunted the Jewish community and the Jewish community took the bait. Now the mayor has been baited.
Mr. Muhammad and his followers have no ideas. They have nothing to say of any use to the black under-class. Tamar notes, “They don’t have answers for the problems of black-on-black crime, for people out of the labor force, for the real problems Harlem faces.”
Not only that, their advice is actually hurtful. Perhaps the most dangerous statement made at the rally was by a self-professed Afrocentric health expert who peddled the theory that AIDS is a white creation. He warned black parents to “be very careful when you take your kids for their polio vaccine…because they” — the white health establishment — “are seeding the vaccines with germs to reduce our population.”
Khalid Muhammad has no sway over the vast majority of African Americans, who think him a fool. And yet, by deploying his baton-twirling police and low-flying helicopters when he simply could have let Mr. Muhammad’s under-attended rally peter out, Mayor Giuliani has turned this buffoon into a martyr.