Two weeks ago, during a Saviours' Day event to commemorate the life of Nation of Islam founder Master Fard Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan had some things to say about Jews. The "powerful Jews," he told the audience inside Wintrust Arena in Chicago, "are my enemy." The Jews are also "responsible for all of this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out turning men into women and women into men" — that is, for the existence of transgender people, which Farrakhan apparently views as a pressing moral concern. He issued a warning to a subset of the Jewish community — "Farrakhan has pulled the cover off the eyes of the Satanic Jew and I'm here to say your time is up, your world is through. You good Jews better separate because the satanic ones will take you to hell with them because that's where they are headed."
Under normal circumstances, sadly, none of this would come as a surprise. As the Anti-Defamation League and plenty of other organizations have amply documented, Farrakhan has been a
hardened anti-Semite — not to mention a committed enemy of LGBT rights — for a long time, and the broader Nation of Islam movement has a longstanding problem with anti-Semitism (as the
ADL noted, Farrakhan was not the only speaker to make wildly offensive remarks about Jews that day). This is a man who has
described Adolf Hitler as a "very great man."
