Well, Louis Farrakhan certainly has
chutzpah. I don't think I have words to describe this.
...For Farrakhan, dialogue equals reparations. Because Jews “are in a position to help me in the civilizing work that The Honorable Elijah Muhammad was given to do by Allah (God).” More specifically: “This is an offer asking you and the gentiles whom you influence to help me in the repair of my people from the damage that has been done by your ancestors to mine.” In other words, after years of unsuccessfully demanding reparations for blacks from the U.S. government, he is now looking to Jews to make amends for their alleged past injustices.
Farrakhan presents this moment as both a unique opportunity for Jews (“This is a wonderful way of the present generation of Jews to escape the Judgment of Allah”) and as an ultimatum:
you may either gather your forces for an all-out struggle against me, the Nation of Islam, and the truth that I and we speak and write, or as an intelligent and civilized people, we can sit down and carve out a way forward that can obliterate the stain of the past and render us, Jews and Blacks … in a new, honorable, and mutually respectful relationship.
Should Jews spurn this offer, Farrakhan threatens “disgrace and ruin”:
should you choose to make our struggle to our people more difficult, then I respectfully warn you … that the more you fight and oppose me rather than help me to lift my people from their degraded state, Allah (God) and His Messiah will bring you and your people to disgrace and ruin and destroy your power and influence here and throughout the world.
He signs off with “Respectfully and Sincerely Submitted, The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, Servant to the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in the West.”...