The Culture of Fear (21 page)

Indeed, the coverage of Khalid Muhammad provides a textbook illustration of how a small story, when placed in a heated media environment, can explode into a towering concern. Initially, Muhammad’s description of Jews as “hook-nosed, bagel-eatin’” frauds was heard only by the few dozen students who bothered to turn out one night in November of 1993 for his speech at Kean College in Union, New Jersey. During that address Muhammad lashed out at gays, black leaders he disliked, and the “old no-good Pope,” about whom he suggested, “somebody needs to raise that dress up and see what’s really under there.” The intense coverage and commentary that followed focused, however, on his anti-Semitism. For months it went on, with
New York Times
columnist A. M. Rosenthal and
Washington Post
columnist Richard Cohen enjoining black leaders to renounce Muhammad.
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By February 1994 the commotion had begun to die down when Christopher Farley of
Time
magazine kicked it up again by running a report on the resentment of some African Americans at white journalists and politicians who, as Farley put it, “feel a need to make all black leaders speak out whenever one black says something stupid.” A month earlier, when Senator Ernest Hollings, a white man, joked about African cannibalism, there had been no pressure put on white leaders to repudiate him, Farley observed, much to the annoyance of A. M. Rosenthal. “Politicization, distortion, ethical junk,” he labeled the Farley article in a convulsive column in which he went on to compare the Nation of Islam—a minority movement within a minority community—to Stalinism and Nazism.
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A segment on the CBS newsmagazine “Eye to Eye with Connie Chung” several weeks later propelled Muhammad’s star still higher. At a speech at Howard University the producers had filmed not only the minister’s anti-Semitic tirade and the audience enthusiastically cheering
him and another anti-Semitic speaker but also individual students declaring that Jews spied on Martin Luther King and arranged for his assassination. One of America’s premier African-American universities is ablaze with anti-Semitism, the segment suggested, though the crowds at Muhammad’s speeches at Howard reportedly consisted largely of people with no affiliation with the campus. As Otesa Middleton and Larry Brown, editors of the student newspaper, subsequently pointed out in an op-ed piece in the
Los Angeles Times,
the producers of the CBS segment included comments from only two Howard students but made it appear that the two represented the views of everyone at Howard. Not only was the impression false, the student editors argued, planting it was journalistically irresponsible. “The media would do better to devote its resources to exposing the real causes of racial and social injustice,” they wrote.
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But the infatuation with Muhammad continued. He garnered major attention for a speech in 1997 at San Francisco State University in which he denied that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust and spoke of Zionists with “hairy hands” whom he said were “pimping the world.” When he announced that he would lead a youth march in Harlem in 1998, Mayor Rudolph Guiliani provided reporters with anti-Semitic statements Muhammad had made over the years and urged them to reprint the slurs. Bob Herbert of the
New York Times
was among those who took the bait. In one of his columns, Herbert made it sound as if Jews had great cause for worry about Muhammad, and about black anti-Semitism more generally. Quoting several of Muhammad’s most loathsome anti-Jewish slurs from the past few years, Herbert issued a challenge to black leaders: “It would be helpful if some prominent African-American leaders, faced with the grotesque reality of a virulent anti-Semite playing Pied Pier to the nation’s black children, would stand up and say enough is enough.”
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Various black leaders, having been chastised several years earlier, had already done so, but others shared the view of Representative Don Edwards, who observed that “this scoundrel would become a national and international hero” by being stigmatized. Indeed, the main beneficiaries of the lavish attention directed at demagogues like Khalid
Muhammad are the demagogues themselves. Nation of Islam leaders use Jew-bashing to attract the media and pull crowds. Even Louis Farrakhan has been a fixture in the press largely on account of his anti-Semitic remarks, which distinguish him from other, more mainstream black leaders. Jonathan Kaufman, a reporter for the
Wall Street Journal
, goes so far as to suggest that Farrakhan’s black political rivals are his true targets when he speaks of Jews as “bloodsuckers” or slave traders. In making such statements he establishes himself, notes Kaufman, as the lone black man who will stand up to whites and openly condemn a powerful group of them. In Kaufman’s view, when Farrakhan slanders Jews what he’s really saying is, “All those other black leaders are too timid to speak out and tell the truth.”
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Farrakhan says much the same about African-American journalists. “A scared-to-death Negro is a slave, you slave writers, slave media people,” he bellowed in a speech in 1996 to a convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. Perhaps what angered Farrakhan about black journalists in the mainstream media is their neglect of him. It has been a group of white columnists, after all, who have built Farrakhan up as more momentous than he is. In addition to Rosenthal, Cohen, and Herbert, there’s the
Village Voice
columnist Nat Hentoff, who has written about him and Muhammad in at least a dozen pieces, and Fred Barnes, the magazine editor and former White House correspondent, who on a network TV talk show dubbed Farrakhan the “leading anti-Semite and separatist in this country,” thereby ignoring thousands of skinheads, klansmen, neo-Nazis and militiamen, and several well-known leaders of the Christian right, all of whom have equal claim to that title. Randall Terry of Operation Rescue, for instance, holds “Jewish doctors” responsible for one-quarter of the nation’s “baby killings,” and Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association sees Jewish entertainment executives as promoting “anti-Christian” television programming and movie making. Pundit and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has spouted enough anti-Semitic remarks over the years that even right-wingers like David Frum of the
Evening Standard
have commented on it. Yet the cumulative coverage in the major media of these white guys’
anti-Semitism barely qualifies as a mole hill beside the mountain of reporting on black anti-Semitism.
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Some surveys do find larger proportions of blacks than whites endorsing anti-Semitic sentiments. Questions beg to be asked, however, about how best to interpret these numbers. Are blacks more negative toward Jews than they are toward other whites, or was James Baldwin correct in an essay he published thirty years ago titled “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White”? Anti-Semitism may be a subspecies of antiwhitism, and it may be largely limited to particular segments of the African-American community. Hubert Locke, former dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, has argued that only at the fringes of African-American communities does serious anti-Semitism exist. In reanalyzing a series of questions from a survey of African Americans Locke found blacks as a group less hostile toward Jews than some researchers have suggested.
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One thing is certain. Black anti-Semitism is not concentrated on college campuses, as much media coverage has implied. “The number of anti-Semitic incidents reported annually on the nation’s college campuses has more than doubled since 1988, the Anti-Defamation League said today,” began an Associated Press story a few years ago that was picked up by the
New York Times,
among other publications. The ADL “attributed that increase in part to messages of ‘racial hate’ that it said were spread by Louis W Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, and other speakers popular with some black students,” the story said without so much as a rejoinder from an African-American leader or social scientist who might have put the ADL’s findings in perspective.
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As suggested earlier in the discussion about road rage, teen suicide, and preteen murderers, when a problem is said to have multiplied it is a good idea to ask, From what size to what size? When advocacy groups use surveys to draw attention to their causes the reported change—however extreme the organization may make it sound—is often from small to slightly less small. Read the entire article about anti-Semitism
on campuses and you discover that “more than doubled” equals 60 incidents. Between them, the nation’s 3,600 colleges and universities reported 60 more anti-Semitic incidents than four years earlier, for a total of 114 incidents. By my calculation, with about 14 million students enrolled in U.S. colleges that comes out to a rate of less than 1 reported anti-Semitic act per 100,000 college students. The story fails to mention how many of these acts were related to Farrakhan and other black speakers, or how the ADL could possibly measure their influence. Even in the unlikely event that black students committed a majority of the anti-Semitic acts, however, only a tiny proportion of black college students were involved.
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Fear mongers did not need many incidents to give the impression that black anti-Semitism flows as freely as beer on college campuses. Subsequent to the speeches at Kean College and Howard came an event in fall 1995 at Columbia University that reporters and commentators made into a bigger deal than it was. The student newspaper
The Spectator
published a column by an African-American senior who wrote of “evilness under the skirts and costumes of the Rabbi.” He wagered, “If you look at the resources leaving Africa, you will find them in the bellies of Jewish merchants.”
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Judging by the quantity and length of stories in the press about this student’s comments and the dissections of his personal and educational biography, you would have thought there was something special about his column. Maybe he had ushered in an ingenious new set of lies about Jews, or maybe, as some writers asserted, he was living proof that in an age of political correctness the only prejudice that can be spoken openly on college campuses is by blacks against Jews.

Wrong. The student’s remarks are ignorant and offensive yet familiar, and no worse than what I have read in college newspapers in recent years about a range of groups—immigrants, gays, feminists, conservatives, and (alas) blacks. The main difference between the Columbia student’s column and other bigoted commentaries in college newspapers is the amount of attention they receive. Around the same time as the Columbia
Spectator
incident a student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin ran a column that said of the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder trial, “to believe
that one cop led a multi-million dollar plot to execute or lock up one nigger (oops did I say nigger? ...) is completely ludicrous.” After student groups protested and called on the university administration to end support for the paper the newspaper’s editors responded, as adolescents will, by publishing an even more objectionable column, this one full of obscenities and epithets about “fags” and “bitches.” The news media paid no attention to the controversy.
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Also around this time, at Pennsylvania State University, swastikas appeared in two dormitories, and on the door of a black student’s room appeared the letters “K.K.K.” Close to two thousand students and professors attended a rally to protest the hatred. There were rallies as well, likewise neglected in the media, at Dartmouth College after anti-Asian and antigay slurs had been scrawled on students’ doors and on literature from student organizations.
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Nationwide, 20 to 30 percent of students from racial and ethnic minority groups report being physically or verbally attacked during their college careers, according to surveys. That is, tens of thousands of attacks per school year—only a small portion of which could conceivably be the doing of black anti-Semites. For every anti-Semitic African American enrolled in America’s colleges and universities there are dozens, if not hundreds, of white anti-Semites, racists, and homophobes.
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Fear mongers project onto black men precisely what slavery, poverty, educational deprivation, and discrimination have ensured that they do not have—great power and influence.

After two white boys opened fire on students and teachers at a schoolyard in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1998 politicians, teachers, and assorted self-designated experts suggested—with utter seriousness—that black rap musicians had inspired one of them to commit the crime. A fan of rappers such as the late Tupac Shakur, the thirteen-year-old emulated massacrelike killings described in some of their songs, we were
told. Never mind that, according to a minister who knew him, the Jonesboro lad also loved religious music and sang for elderly residents at local nursing homes. By the late 1990s the ruinous power of rap was so taken for granted, people could blame rappers for almost any violent or misogynistic act anywhere.
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So dangerous were so-called gangsta rappers taken to be, they could be imprisoned for the lyrics on their albums. Free speech and the First Amendment be damned—when Shawn Thomas, a rapper known to his fans as C-Bo, released his sixth album in 1998 he was promptly arrested and put behind bars for violating the terms of his parole for an earlier conviction. The parole condition Thomas had violated required him not to make recordings that “promote the gang lifestyle or are anti-law enforcement.”

Thomas’s new album, “Til My Casket Drops,” contained powerful protest lyrics against California governor Pete Wilson. “Look how he did Polly Klaas/Used her death and her family name/So he can gain more votes and political fame/It’s a shame that I’m the one they say is a monster.” The album also contained misogynistic and antipolice lyrics. Thomas refers to women as whores and bitches, and he recommends if the police “try to pull you over, shoot ’em in the face.”
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