(5 of 8)
In the early days of the 1984 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, Fruit of Islam guards provided security until the Secret Service took over. Farrakhan was outraged to learn that Jewish militants were shadowing Jackson, that he had received death threats and that his family had been harassed -- facts confirmed by the FBI. Until then, Farrakhan's speeches had reviled white people, not only over slavery but also over what he sees as a vast white conspiracy to conceal the glorious past of blacks as the original human race and the founders of most branches of civilization and scholarship. But he had not singled out Jews for special vilification until his Savior's Day speech that year, when he tried to intimidate Jackson's harassers: "If you harm this brother, it'll be the last one you ever harm." Heard out of context, the speech seemed to be an unprovoked threat. Once he was interpreted as anti- Semitic, Farrakhan reacted with invective that removed any doubt, labeling Judaism "a gutter religion," Israel "an outlaw state" and Hitler "a very great man" ("wickedly great," he later explained).
Since then, Farrakhan claims, he has found his path blocked by Jews in numerous and unanticipated ways. The most costly, he says, came in 1986 when Jewish distributors, angry about his slurs, effectively torpedoed his plans for Nation of Islam cosmetics and toiletries sold under the Clean & Fresh label. Major black-hair-care companies, including Johnson Products Co. in Chicago, agreed to manufacture Nation of Islam products, then backed off, Farrakhan says. Company owner George E. Johnson contends his dealers told him that any dealings with Farrakhan's firm would lead to having his own products boycotted. "When I saw that," Farrakhan says, "I recognized that the black man will never be free until we address the relationship between blacks and Jews."
As recently as last summer, however, Farrakhan seemed to be taking a softer line. According to Representative Major Owens of Brooklyn, a Congressional Black Caucus member, "Farrakhan proposed that the caucus serve as an intermediary between himself and the Jewish community. He did not indicate what he wanted to tell them, but he did insist that he wanted peace, that he had been seeking a dialogue." Yet in November when top aide Khallid Abdul Muhammad made a venom-soaked speech at New Jersey's Kean College, a state- funded school, Farrakhan rebuked him only for his "mockery" and said he could not disavow the anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic and anti-gay "truths" his aide had spoken. Indeed, Farrakhan repeated some of them in an interview with TIME last week.