Word: farrakhan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...They call me racist, they call me bigoted, they call me anti- Semitic." No! You, Brother Farrakhan? What could those reporters be thinking...
...Still, it wasn't Farrakhan who got you down Monday night, or the gang of preliminary speakers railing against the Jewish domination of Hollywood and the international Jewish conspiracy. It wasn't the savage courtesies of the people who checked the audience for weapons; all 25,000 were frisked individually. It wasn't the uniforms of the Fruit of Islam guards, men in deep blue caps and suits, looking like parodies of club-car porters, or the female guards surrounding Farrakhan as he spoke, wearing white kepis and robes that looked like doormen's coats. Nothing that occurred on stage...
...audience that froze the night, the mostly young, carefully dressed crowd of black men, women and children who had clearly come home to Brother Farrakhan. Discount some of their zeal as a thumb-your-nose-at-Whitey exercise. Discount some as exuberance or hysteria in numbers. Still, the Garden heaved with hatred. If you closed your eyes you could picture all the hate mobs ever--Khomeini's mob, Kahane's mob. Their hatred was palpable, enormous. It changed reality. Suddenly the crowd was in the millions, encompassing the living and the dead...
...Farrakhan is a demagogue, though not much of one. Compared with North Carolina's Senator Bob Reynolds, who in 1939 likened the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia to the American pioneer spirit, Farrakhan is rational. Compared with the old antiblack, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish demagogues of the South, like "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman of South Carolina, who boasted to the Senate, "We shot the Negroes" and "we are not ashamed of it," Farrakhan is harmless, at least for the present. He uses the basic demagogue's tools of swinging illogically from one emotional touchstone to another, of performing little body shivers that...
...crowd were not only predisposed to Farrakhan, they seemed to be ahead of him, rising to his message so eagerly it was hard to tell if the incitement preceded the response. Farrakhan's male guards, who sat lined up in chairs facing forward on the stage, were trained to leap to attention whenever the audience went wild, as if creating a sudden row of exclamation points. The drill suggested that the audience must have been bursting to express its hatred all along. It seemed so. Farrakhan may be a second-rate demagogue, but he has some first-rate hate...