The star of the show, however, was Khallid Muhammad himself, who took the stage in the black paramilitary uniform of the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense, the organization he helped found after being booted from the Nation of Islam. Throughout his rambling hour-and-fifteen-minute-long speech, a group of uniformed guards surrounded him and mimicked his every step.
Back in the days when he was Farrakhan’s personal bodyguard, Muhammad carried a .38 hidden in a hollowed-out Bible. In some ways, he still does, attempting to cover his febrile hatreds in the rhetoric of self-empowerment and a sham version of Islam. Most of the time, the cover doesn’t work.
And so we learned that AIDS, asthma, and cancer are creations of the white government "against our people." In fact, said Muhammad, things here in the "United Snakes of America" (he had the crowd repeat the phrase) are so dire that young people must "lay the base for revolutionary change." He suggested as their models not only the Tienanmen Square protesters, but also the Vietcong, Fidel Castro’s troops, and "the youth who stood up with Moammar Al Qaddafi." Muhammad later gave a detailed explanation of the origins of the term "cracker."
There were actually a few moments when I found myself agreeing with him—as when he told the men in the audience to "respect the black woman," and when he criticized the violence and crudity of so many Hollywood movies. But those moments passed quickly—Muhammad went on to say that black men should respect black women because white women are inferior, and that Hollywood is bad because it is "controlled by the Jews." If too many black characters are getting murdered onscreen, the solution is to "make some movies where the cracker is getting killed."
With what must have seemed to him like superhuman restraint, Muhammad refrained from his usual habit of referring to Jews as "bloodsuckers." But he did take pains to catalogue the misdeeds of "the so-called Jews." He explained at length that black people are the true Israelites of the Bible, God’s chosen people, their rightful identity fiendishly stolen by the people today called Jews (whom he said had "just crawled out of the caves and hills of Europe a few days ago"). But in one of the mental contortions typical of Afrocentrism, Muhammad also told the crowd that blacks are the direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians—who enslaved the Israelites for 400 years and were drowned in the Red Sea for doing so. Such contradictions, of course, are irrelevant, the purpose of the story being simply to provide a rationale for hating Jews and for yet another round of Black Power salutes