Disguise

Sun-Times has pic of Minister Farrakhan at Savior's Day yesterday at the United Center, with head "FARRAKHAN SLAMS FILMMAKERS."  But the caption (none of it is online), says he

hit "Hollywood Jews" for "promoting lesbianism, homosexuality" and other "filth" and said conservatives and Zionists manipulated President Bush into war.

That headline is misleading, I'd say, and disguises Farrakhan's anti-semitism.  One must think Sun-Times wants to go easy on him, not upset readers, etc.  Why?  Chi Trib, on the other hand, doesn't even have the item.  Why not?

 

Both papers carried the story last week about Gov. Blagojevich's appointment to his Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes of Farrakhan's "minister of protocol" -- the Trib an AP story, S-T its own, by its Springfield bureau chief, Dave McKinney.  Some Jews objected (no one else apparently), citing Farrakhan's history and last year's Savior's Day speech in which he said,

"Jewish people don't have no hands that are free of the blood of us. They owned slave ships, they bought and sold us. They raped and robbed us."

The new appointee invited commission members to attend this year's Savior's Day address, quoted above.  If any attended, they got the usual earful. 

 

One who would have been disappointed was commission member Richard Hirschhaut, director of the Illinois Holocaust Museum, who said the speech would be a "significant litmus test" on whether the new appointee should stay or go.  He had hoped that this woman's presence on the commission could open a dialogue with Farrakhan's group and perhaps moderate the past anti-Semitic tone of its leader.

 

Didn't happen.